Born tail first, bottlenose dolphin calves emerge equipped with two slender rows of whiskers along their beak-like snouts much like the touch-sensitive whiskers of seals. But the whiskers fall out soon after birth, leaving the youngster with a series of dimples known as vibrissal pits. Recently, Tim Hüttner and Guido Dehnhardt, from the University of Rostock, Germany, began to suspect that the dimples may be more than just a relic.
<p>Bottlenose dolphins have an acute sense of hearing and exceptional vision, but now researchers publish in Journal of Experimental Biology that the mammals have an additional sense: they feel electric fields. Guido Dehnhardt explains that this novel sense could allow the dolphins to hunt for fish buried in the seabed by feeling the electric fields produced by marine animals and could help the dolphins to navigate as they move through the planet’s magnetic field.</p>
New research involving trained zoo dolphins seems to confirm these aquatic mammals can feel electric fields, though some might be better at it than others.