thumb|Statue of Fungie outside the Tourist and Information Office in Dingle. Fungie (), also known as the Dingle Dolphin, was a male common bottlenose dolphin. He became separated from other wild dolphins and lived in very close contact with the people of Dingle on the southwest coast of Ireland.
thumb|Statue of Fungie outside the Tourist and Information Office in Dingle. Fungie (), also known as the Dingle Dolphin, was a male common bottlenose dolphin. He became separated from other wild dolphins and lived in very close contact with the people of Dingle on the southwest coast of Ireland.
Wild bottlenose dolphins are estimated to have a median lifespan between 8.3 and 17.4 years, while one bottlenose has been observed to live for at least 67 years. Fungie was first seen in Dingle harbour in 1983 and continued to seek out human contact over the following 37 years. Thus, Fungie was fully grown and likely already in his middle or even old age at the time of his disappearance in October 2020. By 2019, it was estimated that he was at least 40 years of age and Guinness World Records declared him to be the oldest solitary wild dolphin in the world. His long life led to rumours that the original Fungie had died at some point and been replaced with a lookalike to avoid damage to tourism. However, this idea was dismissed by locals, who pointed out that a dolphin introduced to the harbour would simply leave, for it would not be possible to train a newly introduced dolphin to stay.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).