Unihemispheric Sleep - Is a slow wave sleep that dolphins have adapted in order to sleep while remaining aware of their surroundings to avoid any danger as well as avoid them drowning. Unihemispheric sleep allows the dolphin to shut down one hemisphere of its brain, while closing the opposite side of its eyes. Dolphins are unable to breathe autonomously like humans therefore if dolphins were to go unconscious they would drown. Unihemispheric sleep has allowed dolphins to allow half of their brain to sleep while the other half remains fully alert continuing to breathe and spot any danger it may come across.
Echolocation- Dolphins have adapted a sonar system which allows them to navigate under water despite them being in very dark conditions. This adaptation is one which is still not fully understood among the scientific community, one theory is that the animal send out clicks from its nasal sacs on their forehead, while other theories are said that this sound is emitted from their larynx. These clicks work by continuing to travel until coming into contact with an object, this clicks will then bounce back onto the dolphins lower jaw helping the dolphin locate any object it comes into contact with, with these series of clicks. Dolphins have very high frequency hearing much better than most other mammals and this high frequency sounds help the dolphin determine what it is coming into contact with being said that they are able to differentiate between rocks, metal and even glass along with being able to determine what shape these objects are. In a study conducted with two bottlenose dolphins the results demonstrated that dolphins were able to echolocate up to 100m by routinely producing click packets with short ICI's when they closed in on the object.
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