Dolphins Smash Into 'Monster' School of Salmon in Wild Footage

Two dolphins have been caught on camera slamming into a massive school of salmon, causing chaos as the fish desperately try to escape.
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The video was captured on November 10 off Tura Beach in New South Wales, Australia, by professional fisherman and tour guide Jason Moyce, who goes by Trapman Bermagui online. He shared the video of the breathtaking sight to Facebook.

"Very lucky today to be filming a monster school of salmon, just as dolphins arrive and totally smash into them. I could hear the noise from 100m [about 330 feet] away. Incredible to watch in real life. hopefully the drone did it justice," he wrote in the caption of the Facebook post.

"I'm stoked with this footage. I didn't see the dolphins at all till they just turned up while filming," he wrote in a comment.

There are no species of true salmon off the coast of Australia, so what Bermagui refers to is likely the Australian salmon, Arripis trutta, which is technically a completely different type of fish. These fish gather in large schools as seen in the video, swimming near to the coast, feeding on smaller baitfish like pilchards and anchovies en masse.

Dolphins, as well as seals and sharks, are one of the main predators of Australian salmon. The two dolphins in the video can be seen lunging into the large school of fish, grabbing their prey. As highly intelligent and social animals, dolphins will often work in tandem with other members of their social groups to manipulate a fish school into being easier to catch.



One method that has been often observed in dolphins is herding, where a pod of dolphins herds the fish into a smaller and smaller group, called a bait ball. The dolphins then take turns to swim through the bait ball, picking off fish as they go.

Other techniques used by the dolphins include corralling, herding the fish into shallow waters, making it easier to catch them, hitting the fish with their tails to stun them, and even driving the prey onto the beach itself in a process known as strand feeding.

Some dolphins even use tools to capture their prey, with some protecting their mouths using sea sponges as they forage on the seafloor.

"Spongers really do stand out as being more solitary and less sociable," she says.

And when they do socialize, spongers tend to form cliques with other spongers, and most interesting of all, she says, is that sponging seems to be passed down from mothers to daughters.

"One of the females who was discovered in 1984 is still sponging," Janet Mann, a behavioral ecologist at Georgetown University, told National Geographic.

Dolphins in larger groups may vary the techniques used to reduce competition for their prey.

"One dolphin does this, another does that," Shannon Gowans, a behavioral ecologist who studies the animals at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, told National Geographic in 2019.

"This helps reduce competition between individuals, and gives the [fish-kickers] an advantage over those doing the same thing as everybody else."

Using these varied hunting techniques, dolphins manage to eat between four and 10 percent of their body weight each day.