A dolphin surfaces with a shell on its 'nose'. (University of the Sunshine Coast)
Dolphins off the coast of Queensland, Australia, have been captured on film using a rarely-sighted technique known as 'shelling' to hunt their prey.Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus), also known as 'buthu' in the Indigenous Butchulla language, are intelligent animals known for their tool use.But very few people have ever seen the dolphins' shelling in action, let alone caught it on camera.The new videos, captured at Hervey Bay, were presented by researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast in a study published in Marine Mammal Biology."We were out doing our normal dolphin surveys… looking at dolphins, looking to record behavior, where they are, what they're doing, and also their health," behavioral ecologist Alexis Levengood told ScienceAlert."We were observing a dolphin, and we saw her, all of a sudden, lift this shell out of the water."Levengood is one of the lucky few who have seen such foraging behaviors before – but not in this part of Australia. "The second I saw that shell in the air, I immediately knew what was happening." Levengood said."I was screaming to the students that were on the boat with me in excitement, because I was just so excited that we were actually witnessing this here on the east coast."Until now, shelling had only been formally documented in Shark Bay in Western Australia – nowhere else in the world. Levengood and her team's videos are the first visual evidence that dolphins on Australia's east coast also practice this hunting strategy."They may have both invented this or innovated this independently of one another, or it's even possible that there might be some populations up north that are doing this that we don't even know about yet," Levengood said.Their study also includes photographic evidence of shelling taken in the Hervey Bay area by passengers aboard the Blue Dolphin Marine Tour in 2013 and 2019.
