Shell Shocked! | Expedition Log

Discovering how the

dolphins of Shark Bay are turning shells into tools

Shell-shocked!

Throughout our filming for Our Oceans, we were blown away by the incredible intelligence shown by many sea creatures. But when tasked with unlocking the ingenious secrets of the brainy bottlenose dolphins of Shark Bay in Western Australia, our team had to think outside of the box to try and film yet another Our Oceans world first. Shark Bay boasts one of the world’s most extensive seagrass beds, it was recently discovered that a single plant here has created a meadow covering around seventy square miles, that’s around three times the size of Manhattan! But the size of the seagrass meadows presents a challenge for fish-hunters living here because there are so many places for their prey to hide in the seagrass blades. To out-smart the little fish, a small group of the ocean’s most intelligent mammals, bottlenose dolphins, have come up with a unique strategy - they use empty shells as fishing traps to help them catch the fish! But these Ocean Einsteins didn’t give up their secrets easily, and with such a vast area for the dolphins to fish in, the Our Oceans team had to be as innovative as these clever dolphins and come up with a plan to try and capture this elusive behavior on film.

Stakeout!

At first, the team tried following the dolphins, but they quickly learned that with dolphins moving so fast and unpredictably over such a large area, they had no chance of being in the right place at the right time. So instead they turned to a completely different strategy and began the Our Oceans dolphins stakeout! As Covid took hold across the world, an Australian team was assembled, working closely with esteemed dolphin scientist Dr Simon Allen to identify empty shells which looked like they may be perfect for the dolphins to use. Local filmmaker Leon Deschamps, drone pilot Alex Kydd and camera gimbal specialist Alex Vail rigged the area around them with a specially built long running camera, which could record for days at a time. Days wore on and the team felt they were making little progress, until one day, Producer Joe Tuck, woke one morning locked down in the UK, to a single video. The team had finally caught this ingenious behavior on camera! A year later, Joe was finally able to head out to Australia with Researcher Nadia Aswani to continue filming the dolphins shelling, their patience and persistence paying off as they pulled together the sequence after two long years.

A little help for your friends

By spending so much time around the dolphins, the team revealed even more secrets. They saw how a trio of male dolphins were teaching each other the tricks of how to shell best, and in particular how Osmo, the youngest of the three, was learning the fine art of ‘shelling’ from the gang leader, 'William the Concherer'. This is possibly the first recorded example in the natural world of knowledge transfer through teaching between friends rather than from parent to offspring. But the revelations did not stop here! The crew were also rewarded with another first, discovering a brand new shelling individual who is a female. She became the heart of their story. Simon summed it up best: “She's a sheller! You absolute beauty!”