Visit Speedo's FastSkin Fact Sheet to learn about the development of the new suit. For a follow up lesson on animal adaptations for grades 3-5, go to the Science NetLinks lesson entitled Bird Beaks . For a 6-8 lesson that explores how technology has been used to enhance human abilities, go to the Science NetLinks lesson entitled Extending Human Ability through Technology . How blubber gives dolphins extra bounce. I'm Bob Hirshon and this is Science Update.
Few animals can match the grace and power of a speeding dolphin.
Recently, researchers found that dolphins owe some of that remarkable speed to their layer of blubber. Ann Pabst is a functional morphologist at the University of North Carolina, at Wilmington. She found that blubber is more than just a layer of fat cells. In fact, she and her colleagues found that the blubber between a dolphin's top dorsal fin and its tail flukes is crosshatched with elastic fibers. And in the same way that high tech athletic shoes help basketball players speed down the court, this blubber puts more spring into the dolphin's strokes.