Dolphin Senses

Imagine a world of darkness and sudden light, a world in which you can move not only side to side but up and down as well, a world without a bottom to it but instead a top to which you must periodically rise. And then imagine a world in which your hearing tells you as much about where you are and what’s around you as your eyes do, and often more.

This is the world a dolphin lives in. Though dolphins have all the same senses we do – sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound – they don’t work the same way. And they have an additional sense of echolocation. It’s also been postulated that they can orient themselves to magnetic fields.

Dolphin Sight

Dolphins have surprisingly good vision, able to see a fish in a trainer’s hand well enough to snatch it from the hand without harming the trainer. They have binocular vision to a certain degree, like a human does. They don’t have great color vision, though; it’s comparable to a severely color-blind person. And why would they need it when they live most of their lives well underwater?

Some dolphin behaviors associated with their vision indicate high specialization of the two sides of the brain, which is associated with intelligence. For instance, dolphins tend to swim in a counterclockwise direction in tanks. And when presented with new visual stimulation, like new people, they tend to look at them with their right eyes.

Dolphin Hearing and Echolocation

More important to a dolphin than sight, however, is dolphin hearing. Blindfolded dolphins have been found to have no trouble locating surprisingly small items in their tanks by using echolocation.

Whaling ships have long known how sensitive the hearing of any cetacean is. They always went as silent as they could when stalking whales; any sound in the water could lead to loss of their catch. Dolphins are no different from whales in this respect. Though their echolocation sounds don’t seem all that loud to a human, they can hear the bounced-back sounds from tiny objects as far off as 120 yards.

Dolphins may have two hearing sense organs. The melon of a dolphin (you can see this – it’s the big off-center lump on their foreheads) focuses their echolocation sounds, and may have just as much to do with collecting the sounds bounced back from echolocated objects. They do also have regular ears, and their ability to hear is among the best in the mammalian world.

Other Dolphin Senses

Dolphins are very sensory, and will seek out touch from other dolphins as well as from humans. They do not, however, have strong senses of smell or taste. Their primary sensory input comes from sound.

It’s possible that dolphins also can sense magnetic fields well enough to use the earth’s magnetism to navigate, although this is a poorly-researched area.