• Most humans are right-handed, with a small percentage being left-handed, and the same holds true for bottlenose dolphins. In fact, dolphins are even more strongly right-handed than humans. A team led by Florida’s Dolphin Communication Project studied the feeding habits of bottlenose dolphins and found that the animals turned to their left side 99.44 percent of the time, which actually indicated a right-side preference, because the maneuver puts the dolphin’s right side and right eye closer to the floor of the ocean as it hunts.
• Humpback whales produce the longest and most varied songs in the animal world.
• The bones in a dolphin’s ear are identical to those in a human’s ear, except that they are several times bigger.
• Orca whales are among the most socially stable species on earth. They are also the most widely dispersed mammals, next to humans.
• You might think that a whale’s massive size is the only edge they’d need when hunting in the open waters. But humpback whales team up to use a “bubble-net” technique to catch their prey. Sometimes, the whales swim in an upward spiral and blow bubbles underwater, creating a circular “net” of bubbles that make it harder for fish to escape.
• Blue whales are the largest animals on earth, growing up to 90 feet long (27 m). Their songs can be heard thousands of miles away. This is primarily because they communicate at depths of around 3,000 feet (914 m), using a channel formed by a layer of the ocean where low-frequency sound waves are trapped by temperature, salinity, and pressure and subsequently transported for thousands of miles. This channel is called the “sound fixing and ranging” channel, abbreviated as SOFAR. The call of a blue whale, at 190 decibels, is the loudest of any animal and equals a jet plane taking off.
• Whale songs were first discovered in the 1950s when the U.S. Navy developed a type of sonar designed to spy on the location of submarines and ships during the Cold War. Not only could they hear subs and ships, but they could also hear the singing of blue and finback whales up to 1,800 miles away (2,897 km). The discovery was kept secret because the government wanted to keep the existence of their sonar under wraps. When the Cold War ended, the tapes were released.
• Experiments with captive dolphins show that they can locate a silver dollar underwater at a distance of almost 250 feet (76 m). They can distinguish between a BB and a kernel of corn at 50 feet (15 m). They can tell the difference between identical sheets of copper and aluminum. One dolphin spontaneously learned to perfectly imitate the rise of a scuba diver’s bubbles as he worked in the tank.
• Two pods of killer whales frequent the Pacific waters off the British Columbia coast. One pod is called the Residents because they live there all summer and fall feeding only on fish. The family units stay together all their lives, including the males, and females can live up to the age of 90, while males live up to 60. These whales communicate with their own dialect, and males will only mate with a female killer whale with a different dialect.
• Those with a different dialect are called the Transients, a pod that passes through periodically. The Transients eat mainly seals. Local harbor seals distinguish between the dialects of the Resident pod, who eat fish, and the Transient pod, who eat seals, and stay out of the way whenever Transients are around.
• Groups of killer whales have their own dialects that are further influenced by the company they keep. A 2014 study revealed that orcas housed with bottlenose dolphins over a long period of time were able to replicate the dolphins’ language.
