Bottlenose Dolphin Grace

Grace Richards

Mrs. Cook Science

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Bottlenose Dolphin

turciops truncadis

The Bottlenose Dolphin can be found in warm, salty, open waters as far North as Washington, DC and as far South as the Gulf of Mexico. It can be recognised by its slender, streamlined body, grayish coloring, short, beak-like snout, and blowhole on the top of its head. The Bottlenose Dolphin is classified in the Domain Eukaryote, Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, and Class Mammalia. It belongs to the Family Cetacea, the Genus Tursiops, and the Species truncatus. The Bottlenose Dolphin has Bilateral Symmetry ( it can be divided down the middle into exactly two matching halves) . One of the Bottlenose Dolphin’s behavioral adaptations is that it will hunt by driving fish up into shallower water to better catch them. A structural adaptation is its streamlined, torpedo-shaped body makes it easy for the dolphin to cut through the water and swim faster. A functional adaptation is that the dolphin uses echolocation, a method of locating objects using reflected sound, to sense where its prey is. Bottlenose Dolphins are heterotrophic, and usually feed on fish, squid, shrimp, and crabs. Their few predators include bull sharks and humans. Humans endanger dolphins with pollution and fishing. One interesting fact about Bottlenose Dolphins is that they are very social; if one dolphin in a pod gets sick and heads to shallow water, others will follow, even if it leads to mass dolphin strandings.

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