Common bottlenose dolphin
Tursiops truncatus
— Where the name comes from
Tursiops joins the Latin tursio, the name of a cetacean mentioned by Pliny, to the Greek ṓps, “appearance”: “of tursio-like aspect”. Truncatus, “cut short”, describes the stubby squared beak against the sharp one of the common dolphin. It is the dolphin par excellence — the dolphin of Flipper, of aquariums, and of almost every image in our heads when we say the word.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Cetaceans
- Habitat
- Temperate and tropical coastal waters, lagoons, open sea
- Range
- Every ocean except polar waters; common in the Mediterranean and Italian seas
- Size
- 200–400 cm long, 150–650 kg
- Diet
- Carnivore — fish, cephalopods, crustaceans
- Lifespan
- 40–50 years, over 60 in females
— Characteristics
- 01
It sleeps one brain hemisphere at a time, keeping the opposite eye open: it never fully loses consciousness.
- 02
The melon on its forehead focuses its echolocation clicks and lets it “see” inside sand.
- 03
Several populations wear marine sponges on the beak to probe the seabed without injuring themselves.
— What sets it apart
Every bottlenose dolphin invents a personal whistle as a calf and uses it all its life as a proper name: the others imitate it to address that individual, and a mother separated from her calf repeats his whistle, not her own. It is the closest thing to a name we know outside human language — an arbitrary, learnt label that identifies an individual and is used by third parties to call them. The discovery dates to the 1960s, but experimental proof came only in 2013.
