Dolphins, cousins ​​of whales, members of the Delphinidae family and an animal that captures the heart of anyone who sees one. This powerful marine mammal can swim at speeds of up to thirty-five miles per hour and is renowned for the fact that it can leap out of the water, a feat intended to both conserve energy and get to places faster. When they swim they are as graceful as a swan and playful as a child. Well, read on to learn more about these amazing creatures. When you see a dolphin, your jaw drops, but what kind of questions do you ask? How do they swim so fast, what do they eat, where do they live? First, the anatomy of a dolphin. We'll start with the teeth of a dolphin. Dolphins have eighty to one hundred cone-shaped teeth. These teeth are positioned to hook and hold the slippery fish in the mouth. Because the teeth interlock like this and are as sharp as they are, dolphins cannot chew their food. Therefore, they must be able to swallow the food whole. For a dolphin, an open mouth is a sign of aggression, and banging of the jaws is a sign of even greater aggression. This rarely happens, unless it is during mating season, because dolphins speak without opening their mouths. Dolphins have many ways to defend themselves from predators in the wild. One of which is to pretend to be dead. This may scare some predators, but predators like sharks may interpret this as a sign that it's okay to feed now! To protect themselves while they sleep they close one eye and leave the other open just as one hemisphere of the brain stops and sleeps while the other does not. This is useful in several ways. Dolphins have to remember to breathe or they will die, so the fact that one side of the brain is... middle of paper... for years you can't even begin to talk to dolphins. What's even more amazing is that dolphins even have their own names! A few months after birth, they come up with a series of clicks, whistles, or both to create their own dolphin name! This shows how intelligent these animals can be. Where do you see dolphins most, a river, the nearby lake? If you see one there, something is wrong if you are in North America. South America might be fine, but dolphins usually live in the ocean. Forty types of dolphins live in the ocean while at least four different types live in freshwater habitats. The bottlenose dolphin, spinner dolphin, and orca are all dolphins that live in saltwater habitats. Dolphins usually live in shallow water where you can see the bottom. Freshwater dolphins usually live in large rainforests such as the Amazon rainforest.