Dolphin

Overview

Dolphins are small toothed whales, fully aquatic and built around echolocation.

Every dolphin carries water and moon magic.

Physical traits

Streamlined and fusiform, with a dorsal fin, pectoral flippers for steering, and horizontal tail flukes driving propulsion through vertical strokes. The skin is smooth and continuously shed, reducing drag.

Echolocation is the defining sense. Clicks are generated in the nasal passages and focused into a forward beam by the melon, the fatty organ in the forehead; returning echoes are received not through the ears but through fat-filled channels in the lower jaw and conducted to the middle ear. The resolution is fine enough to distinguish materials and to detect objects buried in sediment.

Breathing is involuntary, as it is for most creatures, so dolphins here sleep normally. The unihemispheric sleep of wild dolphins — resting one cerebral hemisphere at a time, keeping the opposite eye open — does not apply.

The signature whistle

Each dolphin develops a signature whistle: an individually distinctive call that identifies them, which others copy in order to address them directly.

It is biological rather than magical, and it does not replace anything. Dolphins carry an ordinary name as well, and the whistle sits alongside it.

Magic

Two things are fixed: water and moon. Every dolphin has both.

Everything beyond them is individual.

Shared instincts

Echolocation and the signature whistle are the species’ genuine constants.

Social structure is not. Wild dolphin societies are fission-fusion — groups forming, separating and recombining — but here how much company any dolphin keeps, and on what terms, is individually chosen rather than a species pattern.

Where the name comes from

Dolphins are the family Delphinidae, around forty species of small toothed whale. They are among the small number of animals for which a case for culture — behaviour transmitted socially rather than genetically — is genuinely well supported. In Shark Bay, some wild dolphins carry sponges to protect the rostrum while foraging, a tool use passed down matrilineally.

Breeds

Orcas are included. They are dolphins taxonomically and they are dolphins here.

Field notes

Individual colouring, markings, size and magic belong on each member’s own page.