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The "wolphin" is the fertile offspring of a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale (which are different species from each other). This wolphin mated with a dolphin and produced a live baby. Kind of breaks the "absolute requirement" for differentiating species. :-)

From http://www.hotspots.hawaii.com/Wolphin.html :

This may not sound like big news, but when the "girl" is Sea Life Park's hybrid wholphin, Kekaimalu, it's pretty exciting! Her birth on May 15, 1985 was a big surprise for the Sea Life Park staff. Her mother, a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), and her father, a false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens), met on the job in the Whaler's Cove show. Since they were two very different animals, it was not expected that they would produce an offspring, but they did, making Kekaimalu the world's only known living wholphin.

So.....where's the recipe?

if she's the only known wolphin, how does anyone know that she is capable of sexual reproduction? she may merely be a cetacean equivalent of a henny.

however, if you will cast your eyes slightly up the page, you will see an expression of my opinion of the proper use of the term "species":

#813, excerpt:
back to the Canis Family: IMO, dogs, coyotes, and wolves do not have sufficient genetic dissimilarity to be considered different species. That they don't often naturally interbreed doesn't matter - neither do Icelandic ponies with Shires, but both are still horses. Differences in temperament and morphology are likewise insufficient - there is more such variation among breeds of c.familiaris than there are between, say, a north american grey wolfe and a german sheherd.

IMO, "species" should denote a strict level of genetic incompatability when applied to sexually reproduced life forms.

"wolfe"? bedtime is coming on fast.

The "wolphin" is the fertile offspring of a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale (which are different species from each other). This wolphin mated with a dolphin and produced a live baby. Kind of breaks the "absolute requirement" for differentiating species. :-)

Not necessarily. The biological species concept is based on the criteria that populations don't interbreed in the wild. It doesn't require that distinct species are biologically incapable of hybridizing, but just that they do not in fact do so in nature (or do so with a low enough frequency that the populations still remain effectively isolated, i.e. rarely enough that it doesn't matter).

Animals like these marine mammals kept in captivity may behave very differently than in the open ocean. The article doesn't give any details. Maybe there were just one or a few false killer whales. They were apparently kept with the porpoises and therefore may have behaved as members of the porpoise herd. They may have thereby learned and adopted behaviors they wouldn't in the wild. It's likely that normal behaviors, geographical or ecological distribution, and the like, would prevent this from happening in nature.