Sponge the Humpback Dolphin

So Australian humpback dolphins, they’re, they’re resident dolphins. So both the Australian Humpback Dolphins and the Bottlenose, what we would call old school inshore bottlenose dolphins, but I think they’re now called Indo Pacific bottlenose dolphins, as opposed to Common bottlenose dolphins, which confuses me with the Common dolphin. But yeah, so we both species are resident, and because we’ve been on the water for over 20 years in the area, since 1997 with or 96 with the tours, there’s heaps of them that we know as individuals.

There’s a fantastic resident male. We’re pretty certain he’s a male by behavior called Sponge, and he has a really nice little white patch up his dorsal fin. And Sponge is well known male, and he interacts. He brings objects up, like sponges, coral branches, things like that.

So he brings objects up and he throws them around. And he’s always involved in an active fight, whether he’s chasing females, whether they’re leaping and jumping.

So he always knows Sponge because he’s in the thick of the action. That’s fantastic, but it’s also, as I said, it’s one of the animals that presents objects, yeah, not to us, just to the other animals.

-Blue Dolphin Tour (story by Peter, photos by Cassie)

This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 72 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.