A’mystery’ meeting with a pink dolphin and a young of a completely different species was observed.

Scientists are baffled after seeing an endangered young dolphin in Cambodia swimming alongside individuals of a different species.

The young Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris) was probably in a pod of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins (Sousa chinensis) with its mother. The mother and calf protruded like saw thumbs from the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin’s long nose, which is pink, unlike the dark gray and compressed faces of the Irrawaddy dolphins.

The contact was described as “extremely unusual” by researchers from Marine Conservation Cambodia (MCC) on Facebook, who shared the sighting announcement on May 31. Typically, the two species only meet while feeding in the same region.

Although her team was thrilled to see the calf, Becky Chambers, chief scientist at MCC’s Cambodian Marine Mammal Conservation Project, told Live Science that they weren’t sure why the two species were together.

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“It’s a little mysterious,” Chambers remarked.

The disappearance of Irrawaddy dolphins, who are renowned for helping people catch fish by spewing water out of their mouths, is partially caused by entanglements in fishing gear.

The IUCN Red List states that the population of Irrawaddy dolphins is badly fragmented, while researchers are unsure of how many of these dolphins remain in the wild.

On March 12, Chambers and her team came upon the newborn Irrawaddy dolphin calf while performing dolphin surveys off the coast of southern Cambodia. “We see juveniles quite often, but this was a newborn, which is an event in itself,” she continued.

Although it’s exceedingly unusual, Irrawaddy dolphins have been found to hybridize with Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins.

This youngster, according to the Facebook post, exhibited all the morphological characteristics of an Irrawaddy dolphin calf. This indicates that it most likely had two Irrawaddy dolphin parents when it was born.

Both species are capable of alloparenting, which is the practice of caring for young that are not their direct descendants. In rare cases, this behavior may even extend to other species.

Chambers pointed out that the Indo-Pacific dolphins could have acted aggressively, possibly out of rivalry, by attempting to split mother and calf.

However, it seems that the calf made it through its period spent with the humpback dolphins in the Indo-Pacific. It’s possible that one of Chambers’ coworkers saw the calf once again on April 23.

This time, to their amazement, the researcher followed a lone Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin as it approached a pod of Irrawaddy dolphins.

It’s also unknown why the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin joined an Irrawaddy dolphin pod, but Chambers thinks the small calf in that pod was the same one that the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin noticed.