Sea Animals That Hunt With Tools
When people think about animals hunting with tools, marine animals don't usually come to mind. Typically one thinks of cavemen creating primitive tools or apes using rocks to hunt. However, researchers studying humpback whales at the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology have made a discovery suggesting otherwise. It has been found that these whales utilize a technique called bubble net feeding to help optimize hunts. Bubble net feeding is a learned technique that involves a whale (or whales) circling a group of krill while exhaling out of their blowhole to create a vortex of bubbles that disorientates anything caught in the middle (1). This then allows the whales to start a feeding call and consume what is caught in the net. What separates this technique from other tool wielding animals is that the whales create and modify the “tool” on their own (2). It has been found that the whales can regulate the approximate number of bubbles as well as the size and depth of the net, which drastically increases their food input without sacrificing energy (2). This discovery shifts how we think about the hunting habits of whales but also their intelligence and coordination amongst each other.
Wikipedia Contributors. (2024, July 8). Bubble-net feeding. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble-net_feeding
Humpbacks are among animals who manufacture and wield tools. (2024). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240820221814.htm