6 Dolphin Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

If dolphins are your favorite animals, we’ve got a treat for you!

There are so many fun things to know about these aquatic mammals that might even surprise you.

So we put together a list of interesting dolphin facts that you can use to impress all your dolphin-loving friends.

Killer whales, aka orcas, are technically dolphins. In fact, they’re the largest members of the dolphin family.

Dolphins are social animals, so they often live in groups called pods. A dolphin pod can have anywhere from 2 to 30 dolphins.

Dolphins don’t have gills like fish do. Instead, dolphins breathe through the blowholes on the tops of their heads. As long as their blowholes are above the water, dolphins can take in fresh air. And if they really need to, dolphins can also breathe through their mouths like people do.

Dolphins don’t breathe automatically like we do, so they have to be able to actively breathe even while they’re sleeping. When dolphins sleep, they don’t go totally unconscious — instead they only shut off half their brain at a time, and literally sleep with one eye open.

A scientific study suggests that dolphins experience grief if they lose a member of their pod.

There are two different dolphin species that have pink coloring, the Amazon river dolphin and the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin of Hong Kong. The pink hue in Amazon river dolphins is thought to be scar tissue. But for the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins who live in Hong Kong, the pink color you see is actually their blood pumping through their bodies — these dolphins don’t get a lot of sun, so their skin doesn’t really have any pigment, which is why you can see the pink in their blood coming through.

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