Dolphins with Smiling Faces

No other animal is as pleasant and friendly towards human beings as are dolphins. Their docility and friendly manners are obvious from their faces.

During delivery, first the tail, then the body and finally the head of the baby dolphin appear. In order to feed it, the mother dolphin contracts and loosens her milk glands, thereby spraying her milk into its mouth. You can compare this to squeezing a plastic bottle with your hands to spurt out the milk it contains.

Mammals do not need this spraying system to nurse their young. However, such a method is essential in water. Could the mother dolphin herself think up and develop such a system? Could it be possible that she felt the necessity for such a system and supplemented her milk glands with muscles? As you can imagine, this is implausible! As we stressed earlier, Allah created the body of the mother dolphin in a manner that is extraordinarily suitable for the baby dolphin's needs.

The respiratory system of the dolphin is also similar to that of human beings. Yet, unlike human beings, its nostrils are not in the middle of its face but on the top of its head. Like human beings, dolphins, too, inhale air before they dive under water and they retain it in their lungs and then dive. While they rise from deep underwater, just a few metres before they surface, they will breathe this air out forcefully through their blowhole.

You have probably seen on TV how effortlessly dolphins swim in water and even race with ships. They are perfect swimmers. Their smooth slippery skin is the most important reason why they are able to swim so perfectly. These features help them to glide through water and swim very fast. Another feature enabling the dolphin to swim fast is its nose, which is called a snout. A dolphin's snout has the most appropriate shape for fast swimming and has even served as a model for the design of ships. Thanks to this feature, our ships sail faster today than previously.

Do you know that dolphins are bereft of a sense of smell and that they are blind? However, Allah has granted them a very advanced sense of hearing. Dolphins can hear sounds from kilometres away. In addition to that, by means of a system existing in their body that resembles an apparatus used in submarines called "sonar", they can easily find their way and determine their prey's location. This system operates as follows: The sounds produced by the dolphin, which are inaudible to the human ear, spread in the form of underwater sound waves. When these sound waves meet a barrier, they hit it and bounce back. The time taken for the sound to strike a fish or a rock and bounce back shows the distance of the prey or the barrier. This system of dolphins inspired scientists to develop the sonar systems used in submarines.

The dolphin's strong sense of hearing protects it from falling prey to other fish in the ocean.