Boxed Lunch

Dolphins use an ocean tool to catch dinner. Even cooler, they learn from each other how to use it.

Dolphins are known to be smart, social animals. Calves spend years with Mom gaining vital survival skills such as learning how to hunt for food. A new study in Current Biology finds that education also takes place outside family boundaries. Dolphins learn from their peers how to catch dinner using a readily available ocean tool.   

Shelling

Among the many clever techniques dolphins use to catch their pray is the technique known as shelling. Shelling is the use of an abandoned, spiral-shaped gastropod shell to catch dinner. Here’s how it works. A dolphin chases prey into an empty shell. It then quickly hooks the shell with its beak and brings it to the surface. The dolphin shakes out the water, dislodges the fish and eats it.

It’s a pretty cool example of tool use in the wild. Researchers wondered if each dolphin was cleverly “discovering” shelling or if perhaps social dolphins were learning this trick from each other, in what they call “non-vertical transmission.”

More than 10 years of observation and data was collected and analyzed to provide the answer. The research took place in Shark Bay, Western Australia. This World Heritage area has clear, shallow water and a low human footprint making it an ideal site for dolphin research. Scientists have been studying the ecology, behaviors and genetics of this bottlenose dolphin population since the 1980s.

It’s Learned

The data shows dolphins are learning this technique within peer groups. “Our results quantify non-vertical transmission of shelling, however, illustrating that free-ranging dolphins are also capable of learning foraging behavior outside the mother-calf bond,” the researchers said.

This is a first for showing evidence of dolphin’s learning among friends of the same generation, versus within the mother-calf bond, of a foraging technique. The results improves scientists’ understanding of how dolphins may be able to adapt to changing environments. It also brings hope that dolphins may be capable of learning from each other in the case of unpredictable events such as heat waves where food sources may be scarce but tools like empty shells more available.

What was also interesting for these scientists is how similar this learning behavior is to another group of highly intelligent, well studied social animals completely unrelated to these sea mammals, great apes. 

Note: Photo source Current Biology.