‘I was screaming’: Scientists shocked as dolphins filmed using shells to trap prey for the first time

New York Post ^ | Aug. 15, 2026 | Ben Cost

[nickcarraway]

Researchers are shell-shocked at the latest marine discovery.

Dolphins have been filmed using shells to ensnare their prey off the coast of Australia, marking the first time this clever tactic has been caught on camera, per a bombshell paper in Marine Mammal Science.

“The second I saw that shell in the air, I immediately knew what was happening,” the study’s head author, Alexis Levengood, a marine mammal biologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, told ScienceAlert. Levengood said she and her team were on a research vessel off Hervey Bay when they spotted a female Pacific bottlenose “dolphin raising something large out of the water,” the BBC reported.

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TOPICS: Outdoors; Pets/Animals; Science
KEYWORDS: dolphins; food; science

[HenpeckedCon]

If Dolphins are so smart, why don’t they build hospitals?
Rush Limbaugh

[SunkenCiv]

[Paul R.]

MANY moons ago, when it was still legal to keep them, I had 4 small (about 2” long at the most) darters in a 10 gallon aquarium. Initially I fed them short pieces of small garden worms (just long enough to visibly wiggle around), then they learned to pluck the worm pieces from my fingers, then they learned to eat little pieces of hamburger. Eventually, a couple learned to swim up and into my cupped hand (I’d slowly lower my hand into the water) to nab a piece of worm or hamburger from resting in my cupped hand. I’m sure scent had a lot to do with this, but, still, to go from hiding behind a rock when I walked up to the aquarium, to eating out of my cupped hand, in a few weeks...

Not bad for a creature with a brain that’s probably about the size of a pepper seed.

[KarlInOhio]

The seashells joke comes from when the screenwriters for Demolition Man were working on one of their homes. The wife had decorative shells in the bathroom and the writers were trying to figure out why.

[DannyTN]

They aren't the only species that uses shells to catch prey.

[Vigilanteman]

I knew a dolphin trainer a previous life. She told me dolphins have intelligence equivalent to a seven-year-old human with the cuteness to match.