Dolphins and whales are mammals and belong to the cetacean family. The dolphins are active listeners. They spend all their lives playing, preying, and communicating with other dolphins through their ears.
Dolphins have excellent listening ability which they use to locate their pods. They use the echolocation technique to find interesting objects like food. To bring to your knowledge, dolphins have inner ears that aid them in hearing. In this article, you will learn about the listening ability of dolphins which they use to locate their pods.
Where Are Dolphins’ ears Located?
Dolphins do not have external ears. They have two small holes on each side of their heads. However, scientists believe that dolphins hear from the lower jaw bones, which have the duty to transmit the sound to the ear.1
Dolphins have exceptional auditory capabilities. They can hear the sensitive sound seven times more than a human.
Humans can only listen to sounds in the range of 20Hz-20KHz. However, dolphins can listen to sounds from 20Hz to 150KHz.2
Therefore, humans are unable to hear many of the sounds made by dolphins, which are too high-pitched for our ears.
How Do Dolphins Communicate?
Each dolphin communicates at a different frequency, which makes it easy to locate its members in the pod.
Whenever there is a merge of two or more pods underwater, dolphins communicating at slightly different frequencies are easy to locate by their pod’s members. Dolphins use whistle sounds to communicate with other pod members. It signals them to gather in a specific location or to find the separated dolphin from the pod.
Dolphins can easily communicate with other pod members and convey important messages, such as when they have found food or sensed a threat from other whales.
Burst pulses are also crucial for nonverbal communication in whales and dolphins. Bottlenose dolphins use it to gather up young dolphins. In this method, dolphins release large broadband packets of sound that keep them away from killer sharks.
Can Dolphins Hear Music?
The dolphins have a sound listening frequency range of 20 Hz to 150 KHz. They are attracted to high-frequency sounds made by different musical instruments such as flute, piccolo, and high-frequency music.
Can Dolphins Hear Above Water?
Yes! Dolphins use small opening holes on each side of their head to listen above water. However, dolphins under the water listen with a unique bone structure under their jaws, which helps to convey sound signals to their inner ears.
Do Dolphins Have Three Ear Bones?
Yes! Dolphins are mammals, just like humans. They share most of their common properties with humans. Dolphins have three ear bones in the middle ear3, which assist them in hearing sounds both inside and outside of water.
The Role of Echolocation
Echolocation is a process by which dolphins produce short pulses. The sound of these pulses is like “Clicks”. These pulses or sonar signals help dolphins find food or their interested target.
Dolphins produce these sonar signals when air passes through their nasal cavities specifically the phonic lips just below the blowhole. The click sound is created when air passes with pressure from these lips.
When sonar signals are omitted, they bounce off objects and return as echoes. When dolphins receive these echoes, they try to determine the distance, size, shape, speed, and some characteristics of the objects.4
Conclusion
In conclusion, Dolphins have ears but they do not directly hear the sounds from the ears. They have a special bone structure under the lower jaws which conveys the sound signals from outside to the ears.
If you have any questions, you can ask me in the comments. Now, read our next article on types of ugly fish.
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Article Sources
Oceanexist provides reliable information with good-quality references to support the facts.
- Dolphin Anatomy. Oceantoday ↩︎
- The standard audiogram for the bottlenose dolphin. ResearchGate ↩︎
- Evolution of the mammalian middle ear and jaw. NCBI ↩︎
- Possible limitations of dolphin echolocation. Nature ↩︎