| How dolphins prepare their fish
Despite their lack of limbs, dolphins have developed clever ways to use their snouts. A wild dolphin has been observed following a specific recipe for preparing a mollusk meal, even stripping the animal of its internal shell and beating it free of ink, a new study reports.
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The team of scientists from Australia and Britain, who studied the dolphin in the Spencer Gulf in South Australia, were amazed at her precise and elaborate method. The female Indo-Pacific bottlenose was seen repeatedly catching, killing, and preparing giant cuttlefish, which are relatives of octopuses and squids, and spawn in huge numbers. The female herded a cuttlefish to the seafloor, pinned it with her snout, and thrusted downward, breaking the cuttlefish's internal shell, or cuttlebone, and instantly killing it. The dolphin then raised the dead body into the water and beat it with her snout, draining its ink. Next the prey was returned to the seafloor, where the dolphin scraped it along the sand to strip off its bone. Such a complex series of behaviours are unusual among mammals, especially marine mammals. |
The study team observed behaviours of dolphin pods above water in the Australian gulf that suggest such culinary prowess is widespread among that population. The “fascinating" question is now whether the behaviours are learned. However the finding that several members of the Australian dolphin pod seem to be cuttlefish chefs lends credence to the idea that the behaviour could be indeed learned. However, it is not the first time that the species has astonished researchers - a 2005 study showed that mother dolphins were teaching their daughters how to break off sea-sponges to fit over their snouts, to protect them as they probed the sea floor for food. The mammals seem to use the sponges "as a kind of glove" while searching for food but while mothers show both their male and female calves how to use sponges, female calves are almost exclusively the only ones to apply this knowledge.
We already knew that dolphins were intelligent - and now we know that they are excellent chefs as well!
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