Sound Sense: Echolocation by Dolphins

About this book

Many of the dolphin's sensory abilities seem "beyond explanation" but, in Sound Sense, Peter Dobbins demonstrates that dolphin research has come a long way in the past half-century and that the truth about cetaceans is far more interesting than fanciful speculation. Informed by a lifetime's experience of military radar and sonar, the author examines the latest discoveries in dolphin anatomy--their bulging foreheads and unique dental arrangement, and shows how these amazing animals have evolved an echolocation sense that is so well tuned to the underwater environment that it can outperform any man-made sonar.

There is still much to discover about dolphins, and this book will cover science in progress and how creative scientists ask new questions and find ways to extract the answers from masses of apparently meaningless data. The author's purpose in writing this book is to persuade the reader that studying and understanding whales and dolphins makes them more interesting and exciting, not less so, and to present some of the latest theories about how echolocation works.

Contents

Introduction
- What is sonar?
- Sensing in nature
- A history of animal sonar research
- What is so special about dolphins?
- Sounds in the sea
- Dolphin sounds
- Localisation by sound
- Dolphin's teeth
- River dolphins
- The story so far

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