The body and more...
The picture above shows some outside anatomy. I don't have to say anything, I think it speaks for itself.
The Body itself
The skeleton of a dolphin shows that he was a land animal once. The front legs are changed in pectoral flippers. Because they don't need rear legs in the water, they vanished in time of a few ages. There are no extra unnessacery things on a dolphins body. This way they have the least resistance when they swim. Dolphins have a streamlined body. Thanks to this they can swim very fast. They do the "steering" with the pectoral flippers. The most important thing for them to swim is their tale fluke.
Fast Swimming
But how do they actually swim?? Well, to go forward the tale fluke goes up and down. To gain speed they use their strenght in the up-movement. During this the tale goes up in a fast move, while the tale is flat stretched. After that there is a calm down-movement. The tale points are curled upwards. When a dolphin wants to swim fast, he has to breath more often. So he skims over the surface to breath. After that he goes down and accelerates again. This way they can reach a speed from 40- 60 km per hour!!!
Sometimes they don't feel like swimming, and want to play. Then they find a boat and "lift" with it. Want to know how?? Well, they swim along right to the front of the boat. There are always large waves, caused by the bow. The lay in front of those waves and without moving a fin, they get pushed by the waves of the ship.
This is a picture of the anatomy of a male dolphin. As you can see, the organs are very much the same as ours!
But what you don't see, are the ears. What is very tipycal you might think, because of the sonar they must have an excellent hearing! Well, that is correct. But that is because they don't have an earshell like we do. Their "ear" is a very small opening, about 1-2 mm right behind their eyes. The actual place of their hearing is in the head. We are practically deaf under water, but dolphind not. They can hear under water the way we hear above it, and better. We hear the best at the pitch we speak in. Dolphins can hear low pitches, but the best is high pitches. They can even hear noises that are 25 times to high for us! In Holland there are sayings like "as dumb as a fish" and "as silent as the sea". With that we mean that the fish don't make a sound. But that is not true at all. Not only dolphins, but a lot of other fish like shrimps and lobster make a hell of a noise! But only with the help of advanced equipment we are able to catch those sounds. Dolphins have no trouble at all hearing it. A group of dolphins can be very noisy. The larger the dolphin, the lower the sound is.
This is a small pod of dolphins.
Food
The food of dolphin is fish. Mostly the fish with a lot of fat like herring and mackerel. They catch it with a fast bite and swallow it in once. The teeth aren't there to chew, but to grab things. The "chewing" is done in the stomach. A dolphind has like a cow, 4 stomachs. In the first one the food is crushed. The other 3 make it look like porrige. Than it is digested in the large intestine. A dolphin of about 150 kg eats 5 to 8 kg a day. A lot of food is neccacary for them, to live and grow, but also building a layer of fat, muscles to swim fast and as "fuel" for the muscles and stay warm. Fish are coldblooded, the temperature of their bodies adjusts to the surroundings. Dolphins are warm blooded. The body temperature is about 35 to 37 celcius. To keep their bodies warm they need a thick layer of fat to isolate it. The fat out of the fish is also for the fluid. it souns weird, but it is true! The fat is digested by the body, and water is left over. They need it, because they can't drink the salt seawater!
Looking
Dolphins are very friendly animals. It looks like that they always are laughing. This is mostly because of the shape of their beak, but also because of their eyes. They always look so merry at you! They can see very good under water, better than us. But above water they can only look straight forward. Dolphins are very curious. They want to know everything and keep a close look if they see something interesting.
Well, this is it for now, I hope you enjoyed reading it!
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Updated 14-02-2000
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