Skip to content
NatureHQ

Study

The Sonar of Dolphins

Au, Whitlow W. L.

Springer, 1993

Book or monographhistorical workmixed

What they did

A monograph assembling the physics and performance of dolphin echolocation: click production, beam formation, source levels, target discrimination experiments and the acoustics of the head.

Studied in
Tursiops truncatus
Sample size
monographic synthesis of dolphin biosonar measurement

What they found

Dolphins produce short broadband clicks in the nasal passages, focus them through the fatty melon into a narrow forward beam, and receive returning echoes through fat channels in the lower jaw. Trained animals discriminate targets differing slightly in wall thickness or material at distances of tens of metres.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

Dolphin biosonar is a high-resolution, actively steerable sensing system whose performance exceeds engineered sonar on several discrimination tasks.

How NatureHQ reads it

The anatomy is the surprising part and it is rarely explained: a dolphin does not hear through its ears in any ordinary sense. Sound enters through the lower jaw, conducted by specialised fat to the middle ear, and the outgoing click is shaped by a fatty lens in the forehead. Echolocation is also not vision with sound — it returns material and internal structure, which is why a trained dolphin can tell a water-filled cylinder from an oil-filled one.

Limitations

  • Dominated by captive trained bottlenose dolphins performing artificial discrimination tasks.
  • Wild echolocation behaviour is far less characterised than laboratory performance.
  • Species vary considerably in click structure and frequency.

What this study is used for on NatureHQ

One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.

Finding the paper

Published by: Springer journalsPublished in a Springer journal.

Search for this paper by title and author

Reference details for this record were entered editorially and have not been confirmed against a bibliographic register. The title, authors, journal and year are enough to locate the paper; we would rather say this than publish an identifier we have not verified.

A note on this reference: Unresolved: title 100%, author matched, year exact; single register (crossref); a register was unreachable on this run — witnessed today by crossref

NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-10.