Being a long time snorkeler meaning the love for snorkeling, dolphins are one of my favorite underwater mammals. We found this article and thought you would enjoy it also.
Well if that title didn’t get you to raise an eyebrow or two then I don’t know what will. This article is not about making Sushi of dolphins. It is about Dolphins being rather elaborate with regard to preparing their own meals.
I came across this article while diving the net and found it to be quite amazing. I don’t think I really ever realized that dolphins, or any animal for that matter, to be picky in what they eat (cats are an exception to the rule). When I learned about animals in school, it was contained to carnivores, herbivores and omnivores. It seems that Dolphins are pretty unique in the fact that when they eat cuttlefish, they go through some pretty elaborate preparations before they actually eat it. The article is from Reuters which I found at and is a very interesting read. It seems that Australian scientists have observed a wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin go through a precise and elaborate procedure in order to dine on cuttlefish. Catching and eating it is not enough. The preparations include flushing the cuttlefish out of hiding, trapping and killing it, getting rid of the ink (which is the cuttlefish’s defense), scraping it along the sandy bottom to expose and remove the cuttlefish bone which was followed by eating it. Another article which is a bit more in depth (no pun intended) states that “dolphins are well known for their complex social and foraging behaviours” but observing this behaviour under the water is rare. They did observe pods of dolphins from the surface passing the site where the under water behavior was seen. Their passage was marked by fully intact cuttlefish bones (which are buoyant) floating to the surface. This gives rise to the idea that this is a learned behavior and not just a one dolphin occurrence. Here is the complete article from Plosone.org.
