This Dolphin’s Gross but Genius Way to Steal Dinner From Fish

A bottlenose dolphin named Bubbles has worked out a stomach-turning way to eat without hunting: chase a fish until it vomits, then gulp down the meal it spits back up. Filmed off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Bubbles pulled off the trick 11 separate times between 2021 and 2025, giving scientists the most detailed record ever made of this kind of food theft, called kleptoparasitism, in any dolphin or whale.

Staff at a nearby eco resort nicknamed the dolphin Bubbles, and it was filmed near Lady Elliot Island targeting Bigeye Trevally, a common reef fish, and singling out one individual at a time from the school. Rather than hunting the fish outright, Bubbles pursued individual trevally until they regurgitated, then ate what they expelled.

Stealing food from other animals is common across nature, from seagulls swiping meals midair to certain fish and reptiles pulling similar moves. But actually watching it happen underwater, with a marine mammal repeatedly chasing a fish until it gives up its meal, had never been recorded in this much detail before. The study, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, adds to the evidence that dolphins can be remarkably inventive and individually quirky, and that plenty of unusual animal behavior likely goes unnoticed simply because it happens out of sight underwater.

Tracking Bubbles the Dolphin’s Trick Over Several Years

Scientists didn’t set out with a big experiment in mind. Most observations came from snorkeling trips off the western side of Lady Elliot Island, a small reef flat about 80 kilometers from the Australian mainland. Between June 2021 and October 2025, researchers and resort guests recorded 20 separate encounters between the dolphin and schools of Bigeye Trevally using underwater cameras. Eleven of those encounters ended with the dolphin eating food a fish had thrown up.

To confirm they were watching the same dolphin every time, researchers used a classic trick in marine biology: photo identification. Small nicks and notches on a dolphin’s fin work almost like a fingerprint and stay recognizable for years. A distinctive V-shaped scar on this dolphin’s side, along with its fin pattern, confirmed every sighting involved the same animal. Staff at a nearby eco resort already knew the dolphin by sight and had nicknamed it Bubbles, having spotted it around the island since at least 2017.

Inside Bubbles the Dolphin’s Hunting Routine

By reviewing the video footage closely, researchers broke the behavior into clear steps. First came scanning: the dolphin swam slowly and moved its head side to side while clicking, apparently searching the school for a target. Next came targeting, when its head locked onto one fish and stopped moving side to side. Then came the chase, with the dolphin speeding up and mirroring the fish’s every turn, staying glued to it while ignoring the rest of the school.

Each chase ended one of two ways. Sometimes the dolphin lunged at the fish and missed. Other times, the fish gave up its food, and the dolphin grabbed the expelled meal while the fish swam off, its ordeal over. In one case, the dolphin repeated this cycle up to ten times over about half an hour, moving from one fish to the next.

Researchers also recorded audio during one encounter and found the dolphin made two kinds of sounds while chasing its target: sharp clicks, which dolphins normally use to sense their surroundings, and low, short tones lasting less than a tenth of a second on average. Those low tones were produced throughout the pursuit, continuing until the fish gave up its meal, leading scientists to wonder whether the sounds add stress to the chase and help trigger the vomiting. That idea remains a guess rather than a proven cause, since the recorded audio came from just one encounter.

A One-of-a-Kind Skill, Not a Group Hunt

What stood out most to the research team was how consistent and repeatable this behavior was, and how it seemed tied to one animal rather than a group effort. Bubbles was almost always alone while pulling off this move, not part of any coordinated hunt. There was one exception: a 2018 sighting placed the dolphin near trevally alongside another adult and a calf, though no feeding was confirmed that day. Whether that outing involved teamwork remains unclear.

Bubbles has never been seen hunting Bigeye Trevally directly on its own, nor feeding on any other prey during these encounters. That pattern led researchers to think this is more than a shortcut taken during ordinary hunting; it looks like a specialized skill this particular dolphin developed and repeatedly uses. Whether Bubbles figured this out alone or picked it up from other dolphins remains unknown, though the single group sighting means learning from others can’t be ruled out.

Dolphins already show wildly different feeding tricks across different populations, from stirring up mud rings to herding fish together to pulling catches out of fishing nets. Adding food theft from another predator to that list fits a pattern: bottlenose dolphins seem able to invent and stick with very specific, individual foraging tricks depending on their environment and opportunities.

Scientists studying this case are careful not to draw big conclusions from one animal’s repeated behavior. It’s still unclear how much energy or food value the dolphin actually gains from this tactic compared to hunting normally, since no detailed diet data was collected. Still, the repeated, structured sequence of hunt, chase, and feeding, documented repeatedly between 2021 and 2025, makes a strong case that this is a real, established foraging tactic rather than a random fluke caught on camera a few times.

This case is a reminder that oceans still hide plenty of animal behavior nobody has properly documented, not because it’s rare, but because it’s hard to watch. A single dolphin with a scarred fin spent years running the same clever routine on fish nearby, and it took underwater cameras and patient observers to finally catch it in the act. If one dolphin can pull off a trick like this without anyone noticing for years, it’s fair to wonder how many other unusual behaviors are playing out beneath the surface right now.

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