You may have watched videos of dolphins gliding quickly and smoothly in the water. Any idea how they do it? The answer could be in their skin. Come, let’s find out how exactly their skin helps dolphins swim well. Like fish, dolphins too have streamlined bodies. A streamlined body is shaped in such a way that it reduces resistance between a fluid and an object moving through that fluid. The fluid can be air or water, and the object could be anything from fish to birds. In this case, it’s water and the mammal dolphin. The dolphin does not have hands or legs sticking out to slow it down while it swims in the water. Further it has skin that is devoid of hair. These also help the dolphin gather speed in water. But there’s something even more interesting at play.
Dolphins shed skin. That by itself is not unusual considering humans do it too. But dolphins shed skin once every two hours that’s a whopping 12 times every single day! To understand how the soft and flaky skin worked in the dolphin’s favour, researchers from Japan devised a computer simulation, for a study many years ago. It modelled how water flowed over dolphin skin, representing every individual flake and the way it peeled off. The scientists discovered that “the ‘softness or waviness of the skin helped reduce friction”. They also found out that shedding skin reduced the friction by “disturbing tiny whirlpools of water” around a dolphin’s body and “impact their gliding”.
Despite shedding skin so often, dolphins are not immune to skin diseases. Since they’re always wet, they do not have skin dryness. However, changes in salinity or the temperature of water can increase microbe production, leading to skin infection. Stranding is another aspect of concern because the sun can burn their skin.
Picture Credit : Google
