Dolphins Facts

Dolphins sleep with one eye open!

A BBC documentary captured footage of dolphins gently chewing on puffer fish and passing them around, behavior that filmmakers believe may be the dolphins seeking a mild intoxicating effect from the fish's toxins.

Dolphins can rapidly heal from extreme injuries, such as shark bites, and regenerate their original body shape.

Dolphins have names for one another.

In the 1960s, neuroscientist John Lilly conducted NASA-funded experiments where researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt lived with a dolphin named Peter for months, attempting to teach him to vocalize English words.

Dolphins sometimes have fun by blowing bubbles and creating rings of air underwater, which they then swim through.

Whales and dolphins can't taste anything other than salt.

In 2004, four lifeguards were swimming off Ocean Beach, New Zealand when a pod of seven dolphins suddenly herded them into a tight group and started circling. For 40 minutes, the dolphins swam inches from their bodies, slapping the water with their tails. When one swimmer tried to break away, two dolphins pushed him back. Only then did he spot the 9-foot great white shark circling two metres below them.

A dolphin named Kelly was trained to trade litter for fish. She started tearing paper into tiny pieces and trading each scrap separately for maximum fish. Then she lured a seagull into the pool, caught it, and traded that for even more fish. She taught her calf. Her calf taught others. She was training them.

Every winter there's a migration bigger than the Serengeti's - and almost nobody has heard of it. Hundreds of millions of sardines surge up South Africa's east coast in a shoal over 7km long. Dolphins herd them into bait balls near the surface. Sharks rush in from below. Cape gannets plunge at up to 86km/h and a Bryde's whale swallows the whole ball in one pass. Scientists still debate why the sardines bother.

Winter the dolphin lost her tail after a crab trap rope cut off blood flow when she was two months old. A prosthetics team spent 18 months building her a silicone tail. The gel liner they invented to keep it in place - later named WintersGel - now helps thousands of human amputees worldwide.

Two whales got stranded on a sandbar at Mahia Beach in New Zealand. A mother and her calf kept beaching themselves for over an hour. Rescuers were close to giving up. Then a wild dolphin named Moko showed up. The whales seemed to answer his calls. They followed Moko through a narrow channel and swam free.

In Laguna, Brazil, wild dolphins herd entire schools of mullet toward fishermen waiting in the shallows, then slap the water or dive deep to signal the exact second to cast the net. Nobody trained them to do this. Fishermen haul in more and bigger fish, and the dolphins scoop up whatever scatters free. It has happened for well over a century, and how the skill spreads between dolphins is still a mystery.