Incredible underwater footage captures predator’s never before seen behaviour

Cameras worth $11,000 each have been strapped to the backs of wild sea lions to help researchers explore the ocean. They believe harnessing the cognitive abilities of animals will help them discover previously unknown places and undocumented behaviours.

Each time they wanted to attach a camera, the Australian team would select a candidate and then sedate her, a process that took around 20 minutes. In order to retrieve the device so they could watch the footage back, they’d need to repeat the process.

Biologist Nathan Angelakis told Yahoo News he was amazed at the diverse habitats the sea lions explored. The project, which was facilitated by the University of Adelaide and SARDI Aquatic Sciences, collected 89 hours of footage across 5,000 square kilometres of the continental shelf around southern Australia.

"In our study the sea lions mapped completely unexplored parts of the ocean. It shows how we can get a different perspective of marine environments, but working with the animals who forage in them," Angelakis said.

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Sea lion cameras document new behaviour

By including the perspectives of non-human animals in research Angelakis believes our understanding of marine species behaviour will also develop. The cameras were able to capture “really surprising” insights into sea lion behaviour.

“We had amazing footage of prey captures, showing sea lions using really specialised strategies to capture a variety of different fish, small sharks, octopus and stingrays,” Angelakis said of his PhD project.

“We had some sea lions that were pushing their muzzle into the sand, trying to find sharks and rays that were burying themselves in the sand. Others were flipping rocks, trying to catch octopus underneath.

“We also had what we call “sit in wait predation”. We had one sea lion who would swim to the bottom and sit on this one rock ledge. She would just go and lay on it for two to three minutes at a time, completely stationary and wait for a target species to swim by."

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Angelakis said these observations illustrate sea lions are selecting different tactics to capture each type of prey. They also observed a mother sea lion teaching her pup how to hunt.

“We got footage of her taking her pup to sea. And this is the first direct evidence that Australian sea lions pass on their foraging skills to pups,” Angelakis said.

“Its something that’s been hypothesised about for over a decade, so that was a watershed moment.”

The research has been published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

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