Although scientists and marine biologist understand that all mammals, including marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and porpoises require the consumption of water to stay hydrated and survive, they are not 100% sure how dolphins consume their water while preventing themselves from becoming dehydrated from the high levels of salt in the water.

Through careful research they have come to to some conclusions and hypothesis 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 consuming the salt water directly.

Another hypothesis is that when dolphins consume their prey they also happen to indirectly swallow some of the surrounding water along with the food they consumed.

Since all mammals (including dolphins) require the consumption of fresh water in order to survive it is believed that dolphins have an advanced filtration system that allows them to extract additional salt from their urine in order to separate the salt 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, so it is important for these marine mammals to have a way to filter out the additional salt they consume in order 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 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 when at sea and not to consume ocean water.

Unlike dolphins and other marine mammals most land animals do not possess a specially designed filtration system which would be necessary in order to safely consume saltwater and dispense large quantities salt from our bodies.

Although our livers help us remove salt from out bodies we are limited in how much salt we can safety 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 either 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 salt water, 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.