{"id":13118,"date":"2025-07-16T02:31:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T02:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/13118\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T02:31:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T02:31:03","slug":"some-australian-dolphins-use-sponges-to-hunt-fish-but-its-harder-than-it-looks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/13118\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Australian dolphins use sponges to hunt fish, but it’s harder than it looks"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON — Some dolphins<\/a> in Australia have a special technique to flush fish from the seafloor. They hunt with a sponge on their beak, like a clown nose.<\/p>\n

Using the sponge to protect from sharp rocks, the dolphins<\/a> swim with their beaks covered, shoveling through rubble at the bottom of sandy channels<\/a> and stirring up barred sandperch for a meal.<\/p>\n

But this behavior \u2014 passed down through generations \u2014 is trickier than it looks, according to new research published Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.<\/p>\n

Hunting with a sponge on their face interferes with bottlenose dolphins\u2019 finely tuned sense of echolocation, of emitting sounds and listening for echoes to navigate. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt has a muffling effect in the way that a mask might,\u201d said co-author Ellen Rose Jacobs, a marine biologist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. \u201cEverything looks a little bit weird, but you can still learn how to compensate.” <\/p>\n

Jacobs used an underwater microphone to confirm that the \u201csponging\u201d dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, were still using echolocation clicks to guide them. Then she modeled the extent of the sound wave distortion from the sponges.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Sponge hunting is \u201clike hunting when you\u2019re blindfolded \u2014 you\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

That difficulty may explain why it’s rare \u2014 with only about 5% of the dolphin population studied by the researchers in Shark Bay doing it. That\u2019s about 30 dolphins total, said Jacobs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes them many years to learn this special hunting skill \u2014 not everybody sticks with it,\u201d said marine ecologist Boris Worm at Dalhousie University in Canada, who was not involved in the study.<\/p>\n

Dolphin calves usually spend around three or four years with their mothers, observing and learning crucial life skills.<\/p>\n

The delicate art of sponge hunting is \u201conly ever passed down from mother to offspring,\u201d said co-author and Georgetown marine biologist Janet Mann.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON — Some dolphins in Australia have a special technique to flush fish from the seafloor. They hunt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[12782,1147,966,1685,12724,793,79,795,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-13118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-12782","9":"tag-animals","10":"tag-article","11":"tag-climate-and-environment","12":"tag-dolphins-and-porpoises","13":"tag-general-news","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-u-s-news","16":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}