Staff at the Lady Elliott Island Eco Resort off the southern Great Barrier Reef in Australia are well acquainted with the shenanigans of a male bottlenose dolphin they’ve nicknamed Bubbles. Bubbles has been around since at least 2017 and regularly harasses local bigeye trevally, chasing a fish around and stressing it so much that the fish throws up what it has consumed. Bubbles then devours the regurgitated food.
The dolphin’s unusual behavior is the focus of a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. If you’re thinking that Bubbles sounds like kind of a jerk and Flipper would never behave like this, think again. Bees and wasps are common culprits, such as the cuckoo wasp, which lays its eggs in the nests of other wasp species.
The behavior is often opportunistic across many species, including bears, coyotes, and wolves. Raptors, gulls, terns, and bald eagles have been known to attack other birds and take their food. Skuas and frigatebirds steal from other seabirds; masked shrikes steal food from wheatears; and Eurasian blackbirds have been seen stealing smashed snails from thrushes.
Hyenas and jackals steal food all the time. When it comes to marine mammals, there have been reports of Risso’s dolphins charging at sperm whales, and if the whales vomit, the dolphins then consume the regurgitated food. But it’s exceedingly rare among aquatic species, which is why Bubbles’s kleptoparasitism piqued the interest of Haines and her co-authors.
Between June 2021 and October 2025, the authors collected 20 documented foraging sightings of Bubbles, 11 of which involved kleptoparasitic behavior.
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