AFTER a flurry of recent reports claiming dolphins engage in rampant bisexuality, the scientists behind the widely-cited study say they have been severely misunderstood.

A paper on the complex social structure in pods of bottlenose dolphins was published a few weeks ago in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

In one important finding, the scientists noted that both male and female adults were likely to settle near the place where they were born - a phenomenon known as "bisexual philopatry."

Biologist Rob Brooks explained in a blog written on The Huffington Post how a misreading of this term set off an outbreak of false reports about dolphins' sexual preference.

One of the paper's authors, Bill Sherwin, of the University of New South Wales, sent out an email to his colleagues at the school's Evolution & Ecology Research Centre explaining the debacle.

"We put out a paper that said 'dolphin male alliances are not as simple as other species,' but it has stirred up quite a lot of interest, because somewhere in it, the paper mentioned 'bisexual philopatry,' which when translated out of jargon means 'males stay near where they were born, AND females stay near where they were born' - nothing more or less than that," Sherwin wrote.

Parts of his email were published on a blog by his colleague, biologist Stephen Hamblin.