What do dolphins eat? – Dolphinaris
In Dolphinaris, you will enjoy the experience of interacting and swimming with dolphins. Besides, you will learn a lot from them, as they are very interesting and friendly. Have you ever wondered what do dolphins eat? The first thing you have to know is that dolphins’ feeding depends on their specie and where they live. Some of them eat fish like sawfish or mackerel, others eat squids and killer whales can also eat other mammals or even turtles. Nevertheless, their feeding habits are flexible depending on the habitat and the available resources.
When we specifically talk about the common bottlenose dolphins, they mainly feed on small fish, but they can also look for squid, crab, octopus, shrimp or any other small animals. It is very interesting to know that, even though they have teeth, they don’t chew their food but swallow it completely. How do they do that? What they do is throw out saltwater with their tongue and throat muscles and push the fish inside.
To get their food, they usually hunt in a group through different techniques. One of them is a kind of “sheep-herding”, in which a group of dolphins circles a group of fish to get them together in one place while others start eating them in turns. That way, every dolphin gets to eat efficiently. Another individual method is to round up a fish to a shallow water area where they can’t escape, being easier to catch, or they can also use their tails to smash and confuse them, making them easy to catch. Finally, a different way to get food involves the sound waves that dolphins emit. This is known as eco-localization and when they emit these waves they reflect them in fish; that way they know exactly where they are. This works as radar echo. Pretty smart, don’t you think?
Despite their feeding abilities, dolphins don’t stay in the same place for very long. If they do, they ran out of food quickly. That is why these animals migrate to other zones in search of food going periodically back to the same place later.
Now that you know how dolphins feed, you might be wondering if they need to drink water. Unlike humans, they don’t need to drink water, as they get it from their food.
Come to Dolphinaris and learn this and even more while enjoying your dolphin swim!
