Most of us have had a roommate or coworker who steals food from the fridge. Off the coast of Australia, a bottlenose dolphin named Bubbles takes lunch theft a step further, chasing fish until they throw up and then eating whatever comes out.
Researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast have documented his feeding habit off Lady Elliot Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef. Their study, published in Ecology and Evolution, describes what they consider some of the first evidence of kleptoparasitism in a dolphin or any other cetacean, the group that also includes whales. The term means stealing food another animal has caught or collected.
“We observed him repeating this [behavior] over several years, which suggests he may have [learned] to target the fish with the fullest bellies, providing the most rewarding meals,” said co-author Asia Haines in a press release.
How Bubbles the Dolphin Steals Food on the Great Barrier Reef
Bubbles was already a familiar face around the island when researchers began documenting his eating habits. Resort staff had been seeing him since at least 2017. Notches in his dorsal fin and a V-shaped scar on his right side helped researchers confirm they were watching the same dolphin.
Between June 2021 and October 2025, the team gathered 20 records of Bubbles interacting with schools of bigeye trevally. In 11 of them, he ate food a fish had thrown up.
Explore All OptionsBubbles began by moving his head from side to side while making echolocation clicks, apparently scanning the school for a suitable fish. He then singled out one trevally, separating it from the others and tracking its movements.
Next, he sped up, chasing the fish at close range until it threw up. Bubbles stopped to eat the food while the trevally swam away, then returned to the school to start again. Researchers recorded him repeating this sequence up to 10 times in half an hour.
He seemed to stick with his chosen fish even when he had to surface for a breath, returning to chase the same one afterward. Throughout these encounters, the researchers never saw him eat the trevally themselves.
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Making Another Fish Give Up Its Meal
The researchers think the stress of being chased makes the fish bring up its food. Bubbles also makes repeated clicks and low-pitched calls, which they suspect could make the experience even more stressful.
For Bubbles, letting another animal catch his food could save some effort, said Ph.D. student and co-author Romney Edwards-Francis. That might be especially useful when he’s feeding alone. Common bottlenose dolphins often hunt in groups, but Bubbles was on his own each time he was recorded stealing a meal.
What Else Happens Beneath the Surface
If stealing lunch seems out of character for an animal we tend to think of as friendly, Haines said that has more to do with us. Dolphins look as though they’re smiling, she explained, encouraging us to read human feelings into their behavior.
“Dolphins are predators and actively hunt their prey, whether it has been stolen from another species or not.”
For the researchers, the question is whether other dolphins have learned to get a meal this way. Edwards-Francis said feeding habits like Bubbles’s could go unnoticed because it’s difficult to follow animals underwater for long enough to see everything they get up to. Watching from drones as well as underwater could help them follow more of the action.
The team has years of observations of Bubbles coming back for these meals. Finding another dolphin doing the same would help establish whether they’ve documented one animal’s habit or a feeding strategy shared by others.
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Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in Ecology and Evolution: Repeated Observations Suggesting Kleptoparasitism by a Common Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) on the Great Barrier Reef
