Dolphin Reproduction and Nursing

Dolphin Reproduction

Dolphins, like all mammals, give birth to live young, and nurse them with mammary glands.

Dolphin reproduction starts long before a dolphin is born; it starts with all the ritual of how a couple of dolphins first met.

Dolphin Mating

Most of what we know about dolphin reproduction was observed in captivity, which one might agree is not necessarily the same as wild behavior.

However, it has been found that dolphins are most likely to mate during the spring, with a male-female courtship ritual playing a large part in dolphin dating.

When copulating, the male dolphin nudges the female from behind with his sex organ for several minutes, and then mounts her from behind. After this, dolphin mating is roughly as ordinary as any other mammalian mating.

Dolphins are among the most sexual of animals, and are not monogamous. When aroused, a dolphin male may mate several times an hour, often with the same female but not always. Even though, males swim away and female dolphins usually depend on their pods to help them protect the baby dolphin.

Mothers are usually helped to take care of the calves by another dolphin, which acts like a midwife.

Dolphin Birth, Where does it happen?

Humans and other land mammals may have a messy birth, but it’s generally not hard to find a reasonably private place to do it. Dolphins, on the other hand, often live in a three-dimensional world filled with dangers, including the sharks with their legendary sense of smell. Blood and other birth fluids will draw predators.

So how do mother dolphins keep themselves and their babies safe?

After eleven or twelve months, depending on the species, a pregnant dolphin gives birth. Dolphins are among the few animals that have assisted births; when a dolphin is giving birth, she’s often assisted by another female dolphin who acts as midwife.

Birth, can happen anywhere. When it does happen, the mother’s pod will surround her protectively while she’s in labor, waiting to fend off any predators who may be thinking about a quick and easy meal.


It’s A Cetacean! Dolphin Calves

Baby dolphins are born tail-first to avoid get drown and are usually single births, with the exception of a few smaller dolphin species which tend to have two calves.

Dolphin mothers help their calves to reach the surface by swimming beneath them and gently lifting upward to get their first breath.

After that, calves try to feed by finding the mammary glands located in sacs toward the mother’s rear. Nursing continues for as long as twelve to eighteen months,

Calves must eat quickly, as they need to be able to get back up to the surface in order to breathe, and don’t really have the equipment of most mammals for suckling. So instead of dolphin babies sucking to stimulate milk flow, the dolphin mother actually has specialized muscle contractions that squirt milk into the baby’s mouth.

The baby grows very quickly on the high-fat mother’s milk, in some species doubling its weight within two weeks.