Dolphin Watch
Playing with your food
By ANN WEAVER
Article published on Thursday, Aug. 2, 2007
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| Photo by ANN WEAVER |
| Bottlenose dolphins play with their food in a variety of ways. |
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Who hasn’t twiddled with a tidbit of food during a boring date? What parent hasn’t admonished their children to “Stop playing with your food. Eat!”?
Parents abhor it. Grandparents indulge it. Children, innocently or not, play with their food as an apt appraisal of how far they can push their parents. My own parents scuffled with me endlessly over that squeamish sup they called pea soup.
I maintain, and not just in self-defense, that playing with your food is natural. Humans aren’t the only ones who play with their food. It happens in the rainforests and out at sea.
Bottlenose dolphins, the species we study, play with their food in a variety of ways. One gentle morning in early spring, dolphin mother Valiant and her calf VC hunted some shallow waters off a tree-studded coastline. We gave Valiant her name for surviving the 2004 shark attack that left a wide grinning scar on her tailstock. Sliding more than swimming through the soothing translucent surface, she meandered about with a dark flat flounder in her mouth. Apparently, she was in little hurry to swallow it. Maybe she was full or doesn’t like flounder. VC continued to hunt.
A couple of weeks later, adult females Tanks and Courtney wound quietly along the sea wall of a particularly quiet cove. Tanks isn’t built like a tank. Her dorsal fin tatters make her easy to recognize. The first time I saw her, I uttered an appreciative ‘Tanks, kid. The name stuck. Dozing near the boat, Tanks slowly mouthed the tiny tidbit she carried.
Michigan lunged and twisted in the dim light of a recent "Twilight Zone" survey. It not only attracted us to the spot. It also attracted a magnificent frigatebird, the ones who resemble flying dinosaurs called pterodactyls. The bird dove in to snare Michigan’s snack. Review of our dolphin pictures showed that Michigan held a tiny fish in its mouth. In retrospect, Michigan’s surging surfaces were amusing because they seemed way out of proportion to the size of the morsel in its mouth.
Some gyrations are functional. No one is defenseless in nature. Fish defend themselves against predators with a variety of spines and prickles. Grab a pinfish. You’ll see what I mean. It will feel like you’ve been stuck with several pins. Consequently, dolphins must swallow their fish food headfirst so the spines lie flat. Dolphins toss fish or snap their heads to reorient the fish for swallowing. This can take time, like the day Front Slash had to toss her catfish many times to get it right.
Then there’s playing with your food for real because you’re too young to eat it. Dolphin calves learn to fish before they’re weaned from mother’s milk. Last summer, when Little X was about a year old and still nursing, X and Little X hunted off the Treasure Island Causeway. That is, X hunted. Little X cavorted. It zipped around mom’s vicinity, popping out of the water and rolling back in like little kids running, somersaulting and generally dashing around my backyard. Ah, but like kids finding a butterfly, Little X found a little fish the size of your little finger. It positioned itself vertically like a person treading water. Grabbing, releasing, grabbing, releasing, Little X circled in place to keep its eye on the twinkling toy. In a maritime mantra of practice makes perfect, Little X was snagging.
Like young dolphins, young monkeys and apes play with their food to learn about it. Imagine the winsome face of an infant ape, fuzzy with baby hair and wide-eyed at a scatter of colorful fruit around it. It glances at its mother: She’s busy eating. The infant, its mouth a stranger to solid food, starts to make hesitant chewing motions. Later, it will learn to put the fruit in its mouth and then chew. But for now, it will spend a couple of weeks just chewing at the sight of food. Then it will graduate, spending another couple of weeks holding a piece of food in its hand, its mouth again making helpful but hapless chewing motions. Oh, there’s so much to learn.
In the jungle, many a vegetarian citizen lives underneath the regular shower of food raining down like manna from Heaven, compliments of the young citizens living above.
Playing with your food isn’t just child’s play. For adults, it may be a measure of well-being, a sign that the enemy starvation is happily, for the moment, at bay.
There are other reasons too. I mean, why chew gum?
Related stories about these dolphins
Breakfast at the Bottom
Breakfast at the Lone Lagoon Café
Finger Food
Fish Frisbee
Food Court
Gift of Giving
More than They could Chew
Powersharking
Six Minute Lifetime
Tax Time
Twilight Seas
Dr. Weaver studies wild dolphins under federal permit GA1088-1815, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Send her an e-mail at acweaver@tampabay.rr.com or visit www.dazzlingdolphins.com.
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Article published on Thursday, Aug. 2, 2007
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