Bubbles the Dolphin Makes Fish Vomit. Then He Eats It.

A bottlenose dolphin on Australia's Great Barrier Reef chases fish until they throw up. Then he eats what comes out.

His name is Bubbles. Of course it is.

Researchers filmed Bubbles off Lady Elliot Island between June 2021 and October 2025. They logged 20 chases involving a species called bigeye trevally, and 11 ended with Bubbles eating the fish's vomit. The study appeared in September in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

The routine is disturbingly methodical. Bubbles sweeps his head across a school of trevally, clicking, then cuts one fish out of the group and shadows it at close range. His clicks may help him find the fish with the fullest stomach; his low-pitched calls may help stress it into throwing up. Both ideas rest on a single audio recording. On one visit, he pulled the trick 10 times in half an hour.

Scientists call this kind of food theft kleptoparasitism. It's common on land and in the air, but rarely caught on camera underwater. The University of the Sunshine Coast team says this is the first detailed account of it in any cetacean, the group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises.

Researchers still can't say whether Bubbles learned this on his own or from other dolphins, or whether the behavior is more widespread among cetaceans than anyone suspected. At least one outside dolphin researcher has cautioned against reading intent into the footage. The behavior is documented. The intent is not.

Researchers never saw him eat a trevally. Just whatever the trevally had eaten.

Read the full story at Ars Technica, September 17, 2026

Hot Take: Every reality competition has one contestant who wins by letting everyone else do the work, then grabbing the payoff. The reef's version is a dolphin, and the payoff is vomit.