Malcolm Smith, field office supervisor at the Conservation Department's Wairoa office, told AP that a playful dolphin used to swim with humans at a New Zealand beach rescued two pygmy sperm whales. Apparently, the dolphin Moko has guided the two whales, mother and her calf, back to open sea after they became stranded.

The whales have previously been helped by humans swim back to the sea but they kept restranding themselves on a sandbar slightly out to sea from the beach.

"They kept getting disorientated and stranding again," said Smith, one of the rescuers, to AP. "They obviously couldn't find their way back past (the sandbar) to the sea."

When all hope seemed lost and the rescuers were eyeing the possibility of euthanizing the two sea mammals, out of nowhere came Moko which managed to guide the whales to the canal and out of danger. This raised questions about whether the whales could understand the female dolphin's signals or just followed it out of instinct.

"Quite clearly the attitude of the whales changed when the dolphin arrived on the scene. They responded virtually straight away," Smith said to Reuters. "The dolphin managed in a couple of minutes what we had failed to do in an hour and a half." He said this seems the only documented such incident.

Earlier this month, a group of scientists aboard the NOAA research vessel Oscar Dyson in the North Pacific spotted a rare white killer whale in the Aleutian Islands on February 23, among a pod of normally colored whales. Experts say the white coloration could be the result of Chediak-Higashi Syndrome, an inherited condition of the immune and nervous system.