the BBC reported.<\/a><\/p>\nShe instantly recognized the behavior as \u201cshelling,\u201d when dolphins flush prey into a large empty seasnail shell. Then, the impromptu fish trap to the surface and drains the quarry into their mouths like a fishy oyster shooter.<\/p>\n
In the dramatic clip captured in 2025, the brainy cetacean can be seen holding a shell aloft, and then dropping it in the water, before snatching up a fish that escaped its calcified prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was screaming to the students that were on the boat with me in excitement, because I was just so excited that we were actually witnessing this here on the east coast,\u201d exclaimed Levengood.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
While the behavior had been observed in 2013 in Shark Bay, Western Australia, this was the first video evidence of the ingenious prey-snatching method.<\/p>\n
And this wasn\u2019t some fleeting party trick, either. In another clip from Hervey Bay, a mother and a calf could be seen shelling together, demonstrating that the behavior is passed down from generation to generation and not between peers as previously believed.<\/p>\n
Dolphins use seashells to catch fish off the coast of Queensland in footage captured by Sunshine Coast researchers. University of the Sunshine Coast<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw the mother surface with a shell, the fish inside escaped and the dolphin dropped the shell to chase the fish,\u201d said Levengood. \u201cThen, minutes afterwards, the dolphin calf picked up the shell and held it the same way as its mother.\u201d<\/p>\n
While it\u2019s yet unclear if either was successful in their trapping efforts, the scientist said the \u201cfootage provides the first potential evidence of maternal social transmission \u2014 a process by which offspring learn behavior by observing the actions of their mother.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe second I saw that shell in the air, I immediately knew what was happening,\u201d said the study\u2019s head author Alexis Levengood. Levengood et al., Marine Mammal Science, 2026<\/p>\n
When coupled with the observations from 2013, this eye-opening footage demonstrates how populations of dolphins learned to use tools in the exact same manner despite being thousands of miles apart.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey may have both invented this or innovated this independently of one another, or it\u2019s even possible that there might be some populations up north that are doing this that we don\u2019t even know about yet,\u201d Levengood told Science Alert.<\/p>\n
She concluded that either way, \u201cthese findings highlight just how smart, clever, and innovative dolphins are.\u201d<\/p>\n
On a larger scale, shelling could also help shed light on how humans evolved to use tools as well. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut better understanding of shelling and other\u00a0tool use in non-human animals will continue to teach us more about ourselves and how and why we evolved the way we did,\u201d said Levengood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers are shell-shocked at the latest marine discovery. Dolphins have been filmed using shells to ensnare their prey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814918,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[166016,20199,18211,79,3284,201],"class_list":["post-814917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-animals-acting-like-people","tag-dolphins","tag-fish","tag-science","tag-study-says","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814917","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=814917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}