Scientists and marine biologists understand that all mammals require water consumption to stay hydrated and survive.
It includes marine mammals such as whales, dolphins, and porpoises.
However, they are not 100% sure how dolphins consume water and avoid dehydration from the high salt levels in the water.
Through careful research, they have come to some conclusions and hypotheses as to how a dolphin can consume water and not suffer the effects of dehydration.
One hypothesis as to how dolphins consume water involves the fact that much of the food that dolphins eat, such as fish, squid, and octopus, already contains water within its body, so when a dolphin consumes its prey, they also extract the water from their prey’s body, which may be better than drinking the salt water directly.
Another hypothesis is that when dolphins consume their prey, they also indirectly swallow some of the surrounding water and the food they consume.
Since all mammals (including dolphins) require fresh water to survive, it is believed that dolphins have an advanced filtration system that allows them to extract additional salt from their urine to separate it from the salt water they consume.
When a mammal consumes too much salt, they begin to suffer from liver damage, kidney problems, and a host of other physiological issues.
As a result, marine mammals need to have a way to filter out the additional salt they consume to keep their body from suffering from liver/kidney damage as well as a host of other possible organ issues and physiological complications.
When a human or land animal consumes too much salt, they can begin to lose water within the body leading to a net loss in body water, which can cause the body to suffer from muscle cramps, loss of body fluids, dehydration, and in the worst possible cases it can cause death.
This is why it is always recommended that people drink bottled or filtered water at sea and not consume ocean water.
Unlike dolphins and other marine mammals, most land animals do not possess a specially designed filtration system that would be necessary to safely consume saltwater and dispense large quantities of salt from our bodies.
Although our livers help us remove salt from our bodies, we are limited in how much salt we can safely consume.
If dolphins did not possess an advanced filtration system, they too would suffer from the same physiological issues a land mammal would suffer from when consuming too much salt.
Aside from being able to remove excess salt from the body, some dolphin species search for food in freshwater or are exclusively freshwater dolphins which makes it much easier to consume food and water while avoiding the salt found in saltwater environments.
While the dolphin species consists of over 40 different marine mammals, most species live in saltwater.
However, a hand full of species, such as the Amazon River dolphin, Chinese River dolphin, Indus River dolphin, and Ganges River dolphin, are all freshwater dolphins.