50 Fun Facts About Dolphins Trivia for Kids

What kind of animal is a dolphin?

Mammals are warm-blooded and feed their babies milk, so a dolphin calf stays beside its mother and nurses for well over a year, while most fish just lay eggs.

In Laguna, Brazil, wild dolphins help people do what?

Catch fish: the dolphins herd schools of mullet toward fishermen waiting along the shore and signal when to throw the nets.

What is the hole on top of a dolphin's head for?

Breathing is what the blowhole is for: it is really a nostril that moved to the top of the head over millions of years, so a dolphin barely has to break the surface.

Which canned fish often carries a 'dolphin-safe' label?

Tuna often gather beneath dolphins in the eastern Pacific, so fishing boats used to circle the dolphins with huge nets to reach the fish below; the label promises that no dolphins were netted.

What is a dolphin's tail called?

A fluke beats up and down to push a dolphin along, while a fish's upright tail swings from side to side, which is an easy way to tell the two apart.

What is the thick layer of fat that keeps a dolphin warm called?

Blubber covers the body but not the fins and tail, so a dolphin that gets too warm sends extra blood out to them to cool down.

How do bottlenose dolphins usually eat the fish they catch?

Swallow them whole: a dolphin's teeth are for gripping rather than chewing, and a fish that is too big gets broken into smaller pieces first.

What sounds do dolphins make to talk and to find things?

Clicks and whistles do different jobs: whistles are for talking to each other, while clicks bounce off fish and rocks so the dolphin can find them by the echo.

What is the fatty lump on a dolphin's forehead called, which helps focus its sound?

The melon works like a lens for sound, squeezing the dolphin's clicks into a narrow beam that points straight ahead.

Which two animal groups are the best-known users of echolocation?

Toothed whales and bats are not close relatives and came up with echolocation separately, yet scientists have found matching changes in several of their hearing genes.

How do dolphins sleep without drowning?

One half of the brain sleeps at a time while the other half stays awake, keeps one eye open for danger and reminds the dolphin to come up for air.

Dolphins' hearing is so good that some can survive even if they are what?

Their ears work in both air and water, and echolocation lets them see with sound.

What have dolphins been seen doing for a badly hurt friend?

Push it up to the surface: helpers have been seen holding a sick or injured dolphin at the top so it can reach the air, because a dolphin that cannot get there will drown.

Why do dolphins travelling at top speed keep leaping clear of the water?

To save energy: air drags on the body far less than water, so at high speed a string of low leaps costs a dolphin less effort than ploughing along at the surface.

What shape are a dolphin's teeth, perfect for gripping slippery fish?

Cone-shaped teeth are pointed for holding on, not flat for chewing, so a dolphin uses them to grab a wriggling fish and never to grind it up.

In which state was Flipper, the 1960s TV show about a clever pet dolphin, set?

Florida was home to Flipper and the park ranger's family, and although the character was a boy dolphin, the part was played by female dolphins.

Each bottlenose dolphin has its own special whistle that works a bit like what?

A name is how it works: each dolphin makes up its own whistle while it is young, and others copy that whistle to call or get the attention of that one dolphin.

Why do some wild bottlenose dolphins wear sea sponges on their faces?

To protect their snouts while digging: in Shark Bay, Australia, a few dolphins carry a sponge on the beak, apparently as a shield against sharp rocks, as they poke about the seabed for hidden fish.

Scientists can tell a dolphin's age by counting yearly layers inside what?

Teeth: a dolphin keeps one set for life and adds a new layer inside each one every year, so a thin slice can be read like tree rings, and some bottlenose dolphins have passed 60.

Militaries have trained bottlenose dolphins to do what job?

Find sea mines: a trained dolphin searches with its echolocation, and when it finds a mine it drops a marker buoy nearby so that ships can steer clear.

How does a newborn dolphin keep up with its fast-swimming mother?

It rides in her slipstream: by swimming close beside her the calf is pulled along by the water her body drags with it, so it keeps pace without tiring out.

Why did old-time sailors give orcas their scary nickname?

They saw them hunt bigger whales: a group of orcas works as a team, like a pack of wolves, and together they can kill a whale far larger than any one of them.

A male orca's dorsal fin can stand about as tall as what?

A grown-up person: a big male's fin stands up to about two metres high, around twice the height of a female's, so the tall fins make the males in a group easy to spot.

Which sense do scientists think a bottlenose dolphin lacks altogether?

Smell: the nerves and brain parts that handle it are missing, so scientists think a dolphin cannot sniff at all, while its eyes work well both under the water and above it.

Which so-called whales are really dolphins, second in size only to the orca?

Pilot whales are really big dolphins, and their name is said to come from an old belief that a single leader steered each group, the way a pilot guides a ship.

When do spinner dolphins, famous for twirling as they leap, do most of their hunting?

At night: the small fish and squid they eat hide in deep water by day and rise towards the surface after dark, so spinners feed through the night and rest in calm bays by day.

Which is the most abundant cetacean in the world, with about six million alive?

They gather in pods of hundreds or even thousands and have an hourglass pattern on their sides.

What colour do grown-up river dolphins in the Amazon turn?

Pink comes with age: a boto is born grey, and the males end up pinkest, probably because they fight the most and their skin heals pink where it has been scraped.

What can Amazon river dolphins do that most other dolphins cannot?

Turn their heads to steer is the trick: most dolphins have stiff, fused necks, but a boto can bend its neck to weave between the tree trunks when the river floods the forest.

Hector's dolphin lives only around which country?

New Zealand is the only place it lives, and because this small dolphin keeps to shallow water close to shore, getting tangled in fishing nets is the main reason its numbers have fallen.

Which of these sea animals is the most endangered in the world?

The vaquita is a small porpoise found only at the top of Mexico's Gulf of California, where it drowns in nets set illegally for a big fish called the totoaba.

How can you tell a porpoise from a dolphin?

Porpoises have flat teeth and no beak, and from a boat the easier clues are a tubbier body and a small triangle of a fin where a dolphin's fin curves backwards.

The baiji, a river dolphin that is probably extinct, lived in which Chinese river?

The Yangtze was its only home, and after a six-week search of the river in 2006 found none, the baiji became the first dolphin thought to have been wiped out by people.

Which of these animals strains its food through baleen instead of biting with teeth?

The blue whale has no teeth: bristly baleen plates hang from the roof of its mouth and work like a sieve, letting the water out and keeping the tiny krill in, while every dolphin has teeth.

Which land animal is the closest living relative of whales and dolphins?

The hippopotamus looks more like a pig and was long grouped with pigs, yet DNA studies show that whales and dolphins are its closest living relatives.

What does a newborn dolphin have on its snout that falls out soon after birth?

Whiskers line a newborn dolphin's snout and fall out soon after birth, but the tiny pits they leave stay for life and may help the dolphin sense the water around it.

Winter, the real dolphin behind the movie Dolphin Tale, was famous for having what?

A prosthetic tail was built for Winter after a crab trap line cut off the blood flow to her own tail when she was just two months old, and she learned to swim with it.

Which famous actor was in the 2011 movie Dolphin Tale?

Morgan Freeman plays the prosthetics designer who builds the new tail, while the dolphin needed no actor at all: the real Winter played herself.

Dolphins in the wild have been seen doing what with their babies?

Teaching them to use tools is a family affair in Shark Bay, Australia, where a sea-sponge trick thought to have begun with one clever female now passes mostly from mothers to daughters.

What did a wild dolphin called Moko do for two whales stranded on a beach?

Led them out to sea: rescuers had spent an hour and a half failing to refloat the two pygmy sperm whales when Moko swam up, and the pair followed the dolphin to open water within minutes.

Which part of a baby dolphin usually comes out first when it is born?

Its tail usually leads the way, and both the tail and the back fin start out soft and floppy from being folded up inside the mother, then stiffen over the first days.

The ancient Greek name behind the word dolphin is thought to mean roughly what?

Fish with a womb is one reading: the Greek delphis is related to delphys, meaning womb, perhaps because dolphins give birth to live young, though it may simply describe their shape.

Orcas hunt in family groups led by whom?

The mothers and grandmothers run the family: the oldest female leads, and among some orcas her sons and daughters stay at her side for their whole lives.

What does an orca eat?

Fish, seals and even sharks are all on the menu, yet each orca family is a picky eater that sticks to what it learned growing up: some eat mostly salmon while others hunt seals.

Risso's dolphins are easy to recognise because their grey bodies are covered in what?

White scars build up over a lifetime, mostly tooth scratches from other Risso's dolphins plus round marks left by the squid they hunt, so a dark calf can end up an almost white adult.

What did bottlenose dolphins use to inspect ink marks that scientists had drawn on their bodies?

A mirror was all they needed: the dolphins twisted and turned in front of it to study the new marks, which suggests they know their own reflection, something only humans and great apes had shown before.

What are grown-up boy dolphins called?

Bulls are the grown males, cows are the females and babies are calves, and the farmyard names fit better than you might think: cattle are distant land cousins of dolphins.

In a Greek myth, whom did the god Dionysus turn into dolphins?

A crew of pirates kidnapped the god in the old tale, taking him for a rich prince, and when vines sprouted all over their ship they leapt overboard in terror and were changed into dolphins.

Which country named a river dolphin as its national aquatic animal?

India gave the title to the Ganges river dolphin, which lives only in fresh water, so the rare animal has become a living sign of how healthy the country's holy river is.

An Old English word for a dolphin literally meant what?

Sea pig is what the Old English word mereswine meant, and the pig lives on: French speakers probably copied a name like it as pig fish, which English borrowed as porpoise.