Filmmakers in Shark Bay, Australia, have captured a remarkable hunting technique used by bottlenose dolphins as part of a sequence for the BBC TV series Blue Planet III.
“For 40 years, scientists in Western Australia reported seeing dolphins carrying sea sponges and hypothesise[d] that they used them to protect their beaks while foraging in sharp sand,” explains executive producer Elizabeth White in a BBC press release.
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“This filming may have solved a 40-year mystery of why dolphins carry sea sponges.”
Using remote cameras that were specially built for the shoot, the team were able to film the animals with minimal disturbance. And the footage revealed that the dolphins were using the sponges to hunt – but in a different way than first assumed.
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The camera follows a pregnant female as she takes a sea sponge to a bommie (small, isolated patches of reef) and places it against one of its holes. She backs away from the bommie, then sends the surrounding fish fleeing with a burst of speed. But rather than swimming into its hiding place, one fish finds that it’s now plugged up by the sea sponge – allowing the dolphin to tuck in.
As David Attenborough narrates, “In an area the size of Manhattan, she seems to have a map in her mind of where to find sponges and the best bommies. It’s one of the most sophisticated examples of trap setting.”
This is the first time the behaviour has been filmed, and the team who worked on Blue Planet III hope to contribute to further research on it.
Tool use is often used as a marker of increased intelligence in the animal kingdom, and dolphins exhibit many examples of this behaviour.
In 2026, bottlenose dolphins off Hervey Bay (in Queensland, Australia) were filmed using seashells to help them capture fish in a behaviour termed ‘shelling’. The dolphins would chase fish into a large, empty shell, bring the shell to the surface and then shake it to drain the fish into their mouths. The behaviour was also observed in Shark Bay, but no footage was captured there.
Top image: a female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) starts to place a sea sponge (Echinodictyum mesenterinum) into a coral bommie as a means to block her prey's escape route in Blue Planet III. Credit: BBC Studios
