Bottlenose dolphins use ‘mud rings’ to blindside fish in the Florida Keys
Bottlenose dolphins have a clever way of catching prey — and it involves “mud rings.”
The hunting strategy works when a single dolphin circles the bottom of the ocean floor and creates ring-shaped plumes of mud, according to a new study. Other dolphins, meanwhile, wait with mouths wide open and lunge out of the water to snatch fleeing fish.
This phenomenon was documented in the Florida Keys, but has since found its way to bottlenose dolphins in the Caribbean, the study found. The study was published Aug. 2 in Marine Mammal Science.
Video footage shows two bottlenose dolphins, a mother and her calf, applying this clever technique at Chetumal-Corozal Bay in northern Belize on Jan. 19, 2019.
Eric Ramos, the study’s author and Ph.D. candidate in animal behavior and comparative psychology at City University’s Graduate Center in New York, collected satellite imagery of “mud rings” in Florida to verify whether the same hunting method was also used in Belize, the Independent reported.
Ramos told the news outlet that “he was amazed at how two groups of dolphins in different regions had found a similar tactic for trapping prey.” The same tactic may be due to how similar the environment in both areas are.
“You’d kind of expect the dolphins would do it but we hadn’t had evidence before showing that they could innovate a complex foraging tactic that’s so similar in different populations that are not close,” Ramos told the Independent.
Stefanie Gazda, a University of Florida researcher, was the first to publish a study 16 years ago detailing the impressive hunting strategy in only a few parts of Florida, according to National Geographic.
She noticed that a similar behavior called “driver-barrier” feeding “involves one dolphin leader — the driver — herding the fish toward ‘barrier’ dolphins,” a technique that also traps fish for dolphins to eat, the news outlet reported in 2018.
Andrew Read, a Duke University biologist, told the National Geographic that he wouldn’t be surprised if the “mud rings” tactic originated from the “driver-barrier” method when dolphins realized that making a circle is better for catching prey.
This story was originally published August 10, 2021 at 3:24 PM with the headline "Bottlenose dolphins use ‘mud rings’ to blindside fish in the Florida Keys."
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