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Considering they can't wield a knife or cleaver, dolphins make impressive butchers. Researchers in Australia recently observed a bottlenose performing a precise series of manoeuvres to kill, gut and bone a cuttlefish.
The six-step procedure gets rid of the invertebrate's unappetising ink and hard-to-swallow cuttlebone.
"The behaviour seems so obviously related to making the item more palatable," says Tom Tregenza, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter, UK.
Colleague Julian Finn, a marine biologist at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, observed a single female dolphin performing the underwater move in 2003 and again in 2007. At the time, he was studying mating in cuttlefish, which breed in large swarms off the coast of South Australia.