These dolphin trivia questions print as a question sheet with a separate answer key, or play on screen: five rounds, from signature whistles and bait balls to the Dauphin of France.
Read the full guide
Dolphin trivia questions and answers on paper
Answer ten questions and the card offers Print question sheet. More options on that card holds Print answer key, which gives the reason with each answer.
What the five rounds ask
Kinds and names tells a dolphin from a porpoise and a dolphinfish. Body and swimming covers the flat fluke and porpoising. Pods, whistles and play has the whistle that works as a name and the dolphins that walk on their tails. Feeding and young herds a bait ball. Myths, heraldry and people runs from Arion to the arms of Romania.
Questions and answers
Is a dolphin a whale?
Formally, yes: every dolphin family belongs to the toothed whales. In common usage, whale is kept for the larger species, and the smaller ones with a beaked or longer nose are called dolphins.
How do dolphins sleep?
Generally with only one half of the brain in deep sleep at a time, which leaves them aware enough to breathe and to watch for threats. The Indus river dolphin sleeps in bursts of 4 to 60 seconds.
What is a group of dolphins called?
A school or a pod. Pods often hold up to a dozen dolphins, and where food is plentiful they may merge for a time into a superpod of more than 1,000.
How were the answers checked?
Each was read on October 3, 2026 in the English Wikipedia article Dolphin, which every question links. Dolphin hunts, marine parks by name, naval programs and anything about eating dolphin are left out.
An old English name for the dolphin is mereswine. What does it mean?Answer: Sea pig. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
The baiji, a river dolphin that is probably extinct, lived in which country?Answer: China. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Dolphins have cone-shaped teeth. What shape are a porpoise's teeth?Answer: Spade-shaped. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
The Greek word for dolphin is related to delphus. What does delphus mean?Answer: Womb. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Most dolphins cannot turn their heads. How far can a river dolphin turn its head?Answer: Up to 90 degrees. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What is a female dolphin called?Answer: A cow. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What is a group of dolphins called?Answer: A school or a pod. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Which fish, no relation of the mammal, is also called the dolphinfish?Answer: The mahi-mahi. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Which is the most common and familiar species of dolphin?Answer: The bottlenose dolphin. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Which is the smallest dolphin, about the length of a person?Answer: Maui's dolphin. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Which waters do most species of dolphin prefer?Answer: The warm waters of the tropics. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
The wholphin is a cross between a bottlenose dolphin and which other animal?Answer: A false killer whale. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Show all 65 questions (53 more)
Body and swimming 14
A fish's tail fin stands upright. How does a dolphin's tail fluke lie?Answer: Flat, from side to side. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
A newborn dolphin has a band of hairs. Where?Answer: Along both sides of its snout. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
About how far can some dolphins leap?Answer: 30 feet. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Blubber is more than fat. What else does it contain?Answer: A fibrous network of connective tissue. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
How does a dolphin's color vision compare with that of most mammals?Answer: It is more limited. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
On which parts of a dolphin is the blubber thickest?Answer: The back and the belly. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
The orca is a fast swimmer. Up to about what speed can it travel?Answer: 34 miles per hour. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Through which thinly insulated parts can an overheated dolphin get rid of heat?Answer: The dorsal fin, flukes and flippers. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Warm blood leaving a dolphin's heart heats the cold blood on its way back. What is this arrangement called?Answer: Countercurrent heat exchange. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What are the small hairs on the snout of the boto, a river dolphin of South America, believed to do?Answer: Act as a sense of touch. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What does a dolphin's skin feel like?Answer: Smooth rubber. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What does its dorsal fin keep a dolphin from doing?Answer: Spinning in the water against its will. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What has become of a dolphin's hind limbs?Answer: They are gone, with only traces of a pelvis left. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What is it called when traveling dolphins leap clear of the water, which saves them energy?Answer: Porpoising. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Pods, whistles and play 15
A bottlenose dolphin has a whistle all its own, something like a name. What is it called?Answer: A signature whistle. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Bottlenose dolphins can recognize the whistle of a dolphin they have not met for how long?Answer: Over twenty years. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Dolphin groups keep changing in size and membership. What is that kind of society called?Answer: A fission-fusion society. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
During which part of its life does a dolphin develop its own whistle?Answer: Its first year. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Echolocation clicks often come in a short series. What is such a series called?Answer: A click train. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
How do dolphins help an injured or ill member of the pod?Answer: They bring it to the surface to breathe. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
How many dolphins often live together in a pod?Answer: Up to a dozen. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
The Indus river dolphin must keep swimming in strong currents. How long are its bursts of sleep?Answer: Between 4 and 60 seconds. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Moko, a dolphin of New Zealand, was seen guiding which stranded animals out of shallow water?Answer: A pygmy sperm whale and her calf. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
To which of their young do dolphin mothers mostly pass on the skill of foraging with a sponge?Answer: Their daughters. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What do some bottlenose dolphins in Australia wear on their snouts while they forage?Answer: Sponges. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Where food is plentiful, pods may join for a time into a group of more than 1,000 dolphins. What is it called?Answer: A superpod. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Which test of self-awareness, made with a mark and a reflecting surface, have dolphins passed?Answer: The mirror test. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Whose whistle does the signature whistle of a male bottlenose dolphin tend to resemble?Answer: His mother's. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Wild dolphins of the Port River in South Australia picked up which trick from a dolphin that had spent time in a marine park?Answer: Tail-walking. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Feeding and young 12
A pod may herd a school of fish into a tight mass and then take turns feeding. What is the mass called?Answer: A bait ball. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
An orca usually has 40 to 56 teeth. How many has the much smaller common dolphin?Answer: 188 to 268. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
At Laguna in Brazil, dolphins drive fish toward fishermen on the shore. What is the dolphins' reward?Answer: The fish that escape the nets. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
For most of the smaller dolphins, which animals are the only natural danger?Answer: A few of the larger sharks. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
In corralling, where do dolphins chase fish to catch them more easily?Answer: Into shallow water. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
In shelling, seen in Shark Bay, Australia, what do dolphins trap fish inside?Answer: Huge conch shells. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Unlike most mammals, how is a dolphin calf usually born?Answer: Tail first. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What are the main foods of dolphins?Answer: Fish and squid. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What is it called when orcas or bottlenose dolphins drive their prey up onto a beach?Answer: Strand feeding. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Which large dolphin preys on seals, sharks and even other dolphins?Answer: The orca. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Which Roman author left early reports of people and dolphins fishing together?Answer: Pliny the Elder. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
With which part of the body do some dolphins whack fish to stun them?Answer: The flukes. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Myths, heraldry and people 12
Art from which ruined palace suggests that dolphins mattered to the Minoans?Answer: Knossos. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Dolfin was the name of an aristocratic family of which maritime republic?Answer: Venice. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Dolphins appear in the coat of arms of which European country?Answer: Romania. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
The heir to the old French throne bore a title that means the Dolphin. What was the title?Answer: The Dauphin. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
In Greek myth, dolphins were the messengers of which god?Answer: Poseidon. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
In Greek myth, into what did the god Dionysus turn the pirates who had seized him?Answer: Dolphins. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
In Greek myth, which poet was saved from drowning by a dolphin and carried to land?Answer: Arion. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Many coins of Ancient Greece show a man, a boy or a god doing what?Answer: Riding on a dolphin. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
Medieval Latin wrote dolfinus. The form of which language put the ph back into the word dolphin?Answer: Old French. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What did the Ancient Greeks think it meant to see dolphins riding in a ship's wake?Answer: A good omen. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
What is a place built for keeping and showing dolphins called?Answer: A dolphinarium. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
When heraldry grew up in the Middle Ages, how was the dolphin often drawn?Answer: As a sort of fish, sometimes with scales. Source: Wikipedia: Dolphin
How this list was compiled: Written for this site; nothing was copied from another list. Questions and wrong choices are our own. Each explanation restates, in our own sentences, a fact from the English Wikipedia article named and linked beside the question (https://en.wikipedia.org, text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license): Dolphin. On October 3, 2026 the passage that states each fact was read in that article before the question was kept. Left out on purpose: dolphin hunts and dolphin meat, marine parks by name, naval programs, therapy claims, attacks, mating, and what the whale pack of this site asks about all toothed whales (the melon, half-brain sleep in general, the fused neck, the missing sense of smell). Levels are our estimate: easy is fair for any table, medium suits people who know the animal, hard will stump most tables. Unofficial, and not advice on keeping, feeding or approaching an animal. Licence: own work