To keep skin healthy, dolphins will even wait in line for these coral and sea sponge spas.
“These are potent active compounds that we found,” says Gertrud Morlock, an analytical chemist and food scientist at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany and another coauthor of the paper. When they come into contact with the body, she says, the coral compounds may work similarly to the antibacterial creams people put on their skin.
Scientists have occasionally observed dolphins performing similar rubbing behaviors in the Bahamas and Florida, she and her colleagues wrote. The population they focused on included 360 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in the Northern Red Sea. As the researchers watched the dolphins visiting the corals and sponges, they noticed a few patterns.
Calves under one year of age hung back and watched the adults brush themselves against the invertebrates. The adults only did the rubbing under calm and quiet conditions. “If they’re disturbed by boats, you don’t see this behavior,” Ziltener says. “They need to be relaxed.”Groups of dolphins regularly queued up behind each other and took turns gliding towards and rubbing against the coral or sponge. “It’s very organized,” Ziltener comments.
And not just any invertebrate would do. The dolphins zeroed in on soft, branching gorgonian corals as well as harder leather corals and certain sponges. They often slid into the branches of gorgonian corals multiple times, allowing several body parts to brush against them. By contrast, the dolphins pushed a particular body part such as the head or fluke forcefully against the surfaces of the more compact organisms.
The researchers identified a variety of intriguing properties in compounds extracted from tiny pieces of the dolphins’ favored corals. Many of the molecules combatted bacteria, Morlock says, and several resembled the hormone estrogen (which in humans helps
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