• Over many millennia, dolphins have evolved to hunt fish with precision, wandering the oceans in pods in search of food.
  • While this is a daily occurrence for dolphins, it's not easy for humans to catch them in the act — they usually travel further from the shore to find food.
  • A team member at Monterey Bay Aquarium caught spectacular footage showing about 1,000 dolphins on a mass hunt.
Over many millennia, dolphins have evolved to hunt with skill and precision, wandering the oceans in pods in search of food.
This is a daily occurrence for dolphins and one which usually takes place far from land, but this week, something much more exciting happened.
A team member at Monterey Bay Aquarium caught spectacular footage showing about 1,000 dolphins that had gone foraging, gliding through the waters of Monterey Bay in California while funneling fish through their jaws.
Shots like these are extremely rare as most dolphins go further out from the coast to find food, and it's therefore very difficult to sight them while they're eating.
Monterey Bay Aquarium's social media content creator, Patrick Webster, was lucky enough to catch the shots.
Speaking to the Washington Post, he said: "It's a very special sighting nearshore of one of the ocean's magical moments often hidden away from human observation, but to the dolphins it was probably just another Monday."
According to Webster, pods commonly hunt in family or related groups, typically growing to about a few dozen, or maybe even a hundred. Although this is the case every day, it usually does not happen in the researchers' field of vision.