Dolphin cognition

What is a dolphin? When you think of a dolphin you probably picture a bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, the familiar star of oceanaria. But bottlenose dolphins are only one among sixtyseven living species in the fully aquatic mammalian order Cetacea and the diverse suborder Odontoceti (‘toothed whales’). In addition to possessing adult teeth, the many types of toothed whale are distinguished from their baleenbearing relatives, the suborder Mysticeti, by the use of echolocation to perceive their environment. One of the misconceptions about dolphins that held sway until studies in the 1980s and 90s was that they are auditory specialists with poor vision. But we now know that — with the exception of the nearly blind river dolphins — bottlenose dolphins and other toothed whales are highly multimodal animals, easily integrating information about their environment from audition and vision, and probably also other senses such as touch.