Are Whales and Dolphins Marine Mammals or Fishes?
As a teacher myself who used to teach Science to junior school students for years, I have seen a lot of confusion about whales and dolphins and even some frustration concerning their classification. What is the fuss all about? The frustration is basically coming into play when confused people talk about both dolphins and whales as being fishes so when they are being corrected about it, they tend to hate it. According to them, what lives in the water must be a fish otherwise it wouldn’t be there. Isn’t that right? Wrong! The fact and the matter is that fishes like the great white shark and marine mammals such as dolphins and whales are not under the same classification simply because of the way nature created their body, the way it functions and differentiated their needs as well. You see, fishes have gills and take their oxygen directly from the water while marine mammals must go to the surface approximately every 30 minutes to inhale oxygen from directly from the air and get rid of th
