Dolphins learn to wear sponges ‘like a clown nose’ to hunt fish

Some dolphins in Australia learn to wear a sponge on their beak – which allows them to safely forage through rocky seabeds

Dolphins in Australia have developed a unique and ingenious hunting technique, involving the use of sponges to flush out fish from the seafloor.

These bottlenose dolphins don a sponge on their beak, akin to a clone nose, allowing them to safely shovel through rocky seabed channels. This method stirs up barred sandperch, making them an easy meal.

However, new research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science reveals this inherited behaviour is more challenging than it appears.

The sponge, while protective, interferes with the dolphins' sophisticated echolocation system, their primary means of navigation and sensing through sound.

A bottlenose dolphin wearing a marine sponge on its nose to forage swims in Shark Bay, Australia (AP)

“It has a muffling effect in the way that a mask might,” said co-author Ellen Rose Jacobs, a marine biologist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. “Everything looks a little bit weird, but you can still learn how to compensate."

Jacobs used an underwater microphone to confirm that the “sponging” dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, were still using echolocation clicks to guide them. Then she modelled the extent of the sound wave distortion from the sponges.

For those wild dolphins that have mastered foraging with nose sponges, scientists say it's a very efficient way to catch fish. The wild marine sponges vary from the size of a softball to a cantaloupe.

Sponge hunting is “like hunting when you’re blindfolded — you’ve got to be very good, very well-trained to pull it off," said Mauricio Cantor, a marine biologist at Oregon State University, who was not involved in the study.

The skill can take many years to learn and not all dolphins stick with it (AP)

That difficulty may explain why it's rare — with only about 5% of the dolphin population studied by the researchers in Shark Bay doing it. That’s about 30 dolphins total, said Jacobs.

“It takes them many years to learn this special hunting skill — not everybody sticks with it,” said marine ecologist Boris Worm at Dalhousie University in Canada, who was not involved in the study.

Dolphin calves usually spend around three or four years with their mothers, observing and learning crucial life skills.

The delicate art of sponge hunting is “only ever passed down from mother to offspring,” said co-author and Georgetown marine biologist Janet Mann.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.