Senses

Common dolphins eat their prey, small schooling fish, using long snouts containing up to 200 small, conical teeth. However, the Risso's dolphin has as little as six teeth, due to its preference for feeding on squid.

Dolphins have highly specialized senses for their marine environment, to compensate for the opacity of the water at significant depths. Their eyesight, as a result, has become quite profound, especially in the spinner, spotted, and bottlenose dolphins.

Being underwater, however, has caused their sense of smell to deteriorate through disuse, as there is no air to breathe underwater to gain a sense of the odors present. Dolphins' only sense of smell comes from its link to taste, just as it is in humans.

Though dolphins lack hands or appendages in a fashion we would expect would be useful for using tactile senses, they still have a sense of touch to detect when it is safe to breathe with their blowholes above water and when another dolphin attempts to be playful with them by giving them a nudge.

Beyond all the other senses, the dolphins' sense of hearing is by far the most useful. Sounds travel well in water and can be detected by small ears located behind dolphins' eyes. They use sounds in the ocean to detect prey and gain a feel for their surroundings when visual clarity is minimal. Their acute sense of hearing also allows for communication, with sounds produced by an organ called a melon and their nasal sacs.