I am a mammal,
But not a camel.
I have a smile,
As big as river Nile.
Shrimps and squids are afraid to get close,
Is it because I have a bottle on my nose?

Bottlenose dolphins are the friendliest of all the dolphins as they have a smile on their face at all the times. Do they smile looking at us? Actually, the fact is that they have curved mouths and thus it appears as if they are forever smiling. They are very smart, in fact you will find them in most of the shows that are held in the aquarium. They are very quick to learn the tricks.

They belong to the species  porpoises and sometimes even called so, but porpoises are a larger group that also includes animals like the orca and the beluga whale.

Bottlenose dolphins love to travel in schools, Isn’t that cool? They have excellent social skills and constantly talk to each other using sharp whistles or squeaks. However, what they say to each other is unknown to us as we are not able to understand their language. Could it be that they are smarter than us? Their brain sure weighs heavier than ours. An average bottlenose dolphin brain weighs 1500-1600 grams where as an average human brain weighs between 1200-1300 grams. Nobody knows for sure it is just a guess :) Another thing that is very interesting about them is that they help each other to find food and also baby-sit each others calves.

Bottlenose dolphins are exceptionally fast swimmers as they can almost reach up to 30km/h. They surface often to breathe, doing so two or three times a minute. This explains why they swim very close to the surface of water as they need to come up for fresh breaths of air.

How do they find food? If they make the squeaky sounds don’t they scare away all the fish? Well they use a technique called echolocation to find food and avoid obstacles in the way. How does this work? Curious? They send sound waves of very small frequency ( meaning not everyone can hear those). These sound waves go out in all direction hit the prey or any other obstacle and get back. Their is an organ called mellon that calculates the time in which the sound came back ( which helps them calculate the distance), and also the shape of the object that reflected the sound wave. It is very much like a sonar.

Bottlenose dolphins prefer to live in warm waters and that is why they are found in tropical oceans and other warm waters around the globe. Although they are not hunted like they were in the past for their meat and oil, they still get hurt. They get trapped in the nets that are laid for catching tuna or squids.