Yes, dolphins use tools, and they’re one of the few non-primate species confirmed to do so. The best-documented examples come from bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, where individuals use marine sponges, conch shells, and even mud as instruments to catch food. These behaviors aren’t instinctive reflexes shared across the species. They’re learned skills passed between generations, practiced by specific groups within a larger population.
Sponge Foraging: The Best-Known Example
The most studied form of dolphin tool use is called “sponging.” A dolphin breaks a cone-shaped marine sponge off the seafloor and wears it over the tip of its beak, like a protective glove. With the sponge in place, the dolphin swims slowly along sandy bottom habitats, gently disturbing the substrate as it searches for buried fish. When it detects prey, it drops the sponge, accelerates about 5 to 10 meters forward, and probes the seafloor with its exposed beak to grab the fish.
The sponge serves as armor. The sandy, rocky bottom of these deep channels is full of sharp debris, broken coral, and stinging organisms that could injure a dolphin’s sensitive rostrum (the technical name for its beak). By wearing a sponge while rooting around, the dolphin can hunt in terrain that would otherwise be painful or risky to probe.
This strategy also gives spongers access to prey that other dolphins can’t easily catch. About 78% of the fish extracted during sponge foraging lack swim bladders, the gas-filled organs most fish use for buoyancy. Fish without swim bladders tend to sit motionless on or in the substrate, making them invisible to echolocation, which works by bouncing sound off objects. A dolphin scanning open water would never detect them. But a sponger physically disturbing the sand can flush them out. These bottom-dwelling fish, like barred sandperch, tend to be higher in fat content than typical free-swimming prey, offering a small but reliable and energy-rich food source.
Shelling: Trapping Fish in Conch Shells
A newer behavior called “shelling” or “conching” has also been observed in Shark Bay. A dolphin finds a large conch shell where a fish has taken shelter, grabs the shell in its beak, carries it to the surface, then tilts it on its side. The water drains out, and the trapped fish drops straight into the dolphin’s open mouth.
Researchers aren’t entirely sure what happens before the dolphins surface with the shell. The dolphins may simply grab a shell after spotting a fish dart inside, or they may actively herd fish into empty shells, effectively setting traps. If the latter is true, it would represent an even more sophisticated level of planning. Either way, shelling qualifies as tool use: the dolphin is manipulating an external object to obtain food it couldn’t otherwise access.
Mud Ring Feeding
In Florida Bay, bottlenose dolphins use a technique called mud ring feeding. One dolphin swims in a tight circle while beating its tail flukes against the shallow bottom, kicking up a ring of mud that forms a visual barrier around a school of fish. Panicked by the enclosing wall of sediment, the fish leap out of the water and land directly into the mouths of one or more dolphins waiting at the surface. Scientific reviews of aquatic tool use classify this as foraging with an abiotic (non-living) tool, since the dolphin is deliberately manipulating a physical substance in its environment to corral prey.
Who Uses Tools and Who Doesn’t
Tool use in dolphins is rare. Among all cetaceans (dolphins, whales, and porpoises), confirmed tool use has only been documented in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, and primarily within the single population at Shark Bay. Not every dolphin in Shark Bay sponges or shells. Only a subset of the population practices these techniques, and individuals who don’t use tools never seem to pick them up on their own by watching unrelated dolphins do it.
That selectivity is part of what makes the behavior so interesting. Sponging is transmitted vertically, meaning mothers teach it to their calves. Research using network analysis and genetic data has confirmed that the skill passes almost exclusively through maternal lines, with daughters more likely to adopt it than sons. This pattern mirrors cultural transmission in humans more closely than simple genetic inheritance. A calf doesn’t sponge because it has “sponging genes.” It sponges because it spent years foraging alongside a mother who modeled the technique.
Tool Users Form Their Own Social Groups
Tool use doesn’t just affect how dolphins eat. It shapes who they spend time with. Studies of social networks in Shark Bay found that female spongers preferentially associate with other spongers over non-spongers. This homophily, the tendency to cluster with similar individuals, held up even after researchers controlled for maternal kinship, sex, and geographic overlap. Sponging females were more cliquish than non-spongers, forming tighter, more exclusive social bonds.
This is striking because it parallels a pattern familiar in human societies: people who share a subculture tend to gravitate toward each other. The fact that tool-using dolphins do the same thing strongly suggests sponging is a genuine cultural behavior, not just a quirky individual habit. It creates a shared identity that influences social structure within the broader population.
Why Only Some Dolphins Need Tools
The key question is why tool use appears in some dolphin communities and not others. The answer comes down to habitat. Shark Bay’s deep channels have barren, sandy substrates where bottom-dwelling fish hide in the sediment. These fish are invisible to echolocation and can’t be caught by chasing them through open water. Sponging evolved as a solution to a specific ecological problem: extracting hidden, energy-rich prey from a difficult environment.
Researchers who replicated the sponging technique by hand, dragging sponges along the same transects where dolphins forage, found significantly more buried prey on sponging routes than on comparable non-sponging routes. The prey is there, but it takes a specialized technique to get at it. Dolphins in other habitats, where fish swim freely in the water column, simply don’t face this challenge and have no need for the tool.
This ecological specificity helps explain why tool use remains confined to a small subset of the world’s dolphin populations. It’s not that other dolphins lack the cognitive ability. It’s that their environment doesn’t reward the behavior. In Shark Bay, a combination of deep channels, sandy substrate, and energy-rich buried prey created exactly the right conditions for tool use to emerge, persist, and be worth the extra effort of teaching to the next generation.