YOUNG dolphins swim alongside their mothers in the open ocean for up to three years. But no one has worked out how the young calves manage to keep up. Now the secret is out: the calves swim so close to their mothers that they get sucked along, says Daniel Weihs, an aerospace engineer at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
Weihs studied dolphins with the US National Marine Fishery Service in San Diego, and found that young calves swim about 10 to 30 centimetres away from the mother’s body, aligning the midpoint of their bodies with her tail.…
