Researchers are shocked by the latest marine discovery. Dolphins have been filmed using shells to catch prey off the coast of Australia, marking the first time this clever tactic has been caught on camera, according to an explosive article in Marine Mammal Science. “The moment I saw that shell in the air, I immediately knew what was happening,” the study’s lead author, Alexis Levengood, a marine mammal biologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, told ScienceAlert. A dolphin emerges with a shell on its nose. University of the Sunshine Coast Levengood said she and her team were on a research boat off Hervey Bay when they saw a female Pacific bottlenose dolphin “lifting something large out of the water,” the BBC reported. He instantly recognized the behavior as “shelling,” when dolphins throw their prey into a large, empty snail shell. The makeshift fish then come to the surface and drain the prey into their mouths like a fishy oyster shooter. In the dramatic clip captured in 2025, the clever cetacean can be seen holding a shell high and then throwing it into the water, before catching a fish that escaped from its calcified prison. “I was yelling excitedly to the students who were on the boat with me, because I was so excited that we were actually witnessing this here on the East Coast,” Levengood exclaimed. While the behavior was observed in 2013 in Shark Bay, Western Australia, this was the first video evidence of this ingenious prey capture method. And this wasn’t a fleeting party trick either. In another video from Hervey Bay, a mother and calf could be seen shooting together, showing that the behavior is passed down from generation to generation and not between pairs as previously believed. Dolphins use seashells to fish off the coast of Queensland in footage captured by Sunshine Coast researchers. University of the Sunshine Coast “We saw the mother come to the surface with a shell, the fish inside escaped and the dolphin dropped the shell to chase the fish,” Levengood said. “Then, minutes later, the baby dolphin picked up the shell and held it in the same way as its mother.” While it is still unclear whether either were successful in their capture efforts, the scientist said that “the images provide the first potential evidence of maternal social transmission, a process by which offspring learn behavior by observing their mother’s actions.” “The moment I saw that projectile in the air, I immediately knew what was happening,” said the study’s lead author, Alexis Levengood. Levengood et al., Marine Mammal Science, 2026 When combined with observations from 2013, this revealing footage demonstrates how dolphin populations learned to use tools in exactly the same way despite being thousands of kilometers apart. “It’s possible that they both invented or innovated this independently of each other, or it’s even possible that there are some populations in the north that are doing this that we don’t even know about yet,” Levengood told Science Alert. He concluded that, either way, “these findings highlight how intelligent, cunning and innovative dolphins are.” On a larger scale, bombing could also help shed light on how humans evolved to use tools. “But a better understanding of the use of shelling and other tools on non-human animals will continue to teach us more about ourselves and how and why we evolved the way we did,” Levengood said.
