Observations on eight bottlenose dolphins located in the Southern Hemisphere during rest indicated that they spent the majority of the
time (85%) engaged in behaviors that can be considered clockwise. This is in contrast with many observations of sleeping/resting dolphins in
the Northern Hemisphere that spend the majority of their time involved in counterclockwise activity. This observation leads to the possibility
that the reason for preferential swimming biases in dolphins is the result of global forces rather than the result of the anatomy of the individual
dolphins. Our observations also indicate that dolphins change overt behavior every 40 s, coincident with the respiration rate. The possibility
is suggested that the salience of neural activity controlling respiration in the reticular system may effect/disrupt reticular attentional
mechanisms, thus leading to the changes in overt behavior. It is hypothesized that this 40-s period may represent the possible attention span
of the sleeping bottlenose dolphin.