Dolphins perfect bubble rings underwater

SeaWorld has revealed amazing footage of dolphins blowing bubble rings out of their blowholes.
They are captured blowing puffs of air and angling their heads so that they rise in a straight line thereby creating the perfect circles.
The underwater mammals from Sea World Orlando's Dolphin Cove are shown playing with the large bubble rings and spinning them around with their noses. They also bite into them to create smaller circles.
'It's a cool behaviour the dolphins seem to learn from one another,' one trainer said.
Another said it was the 'most incredible thing' he had ever seen.

Most of the playful mammals who display the behaviour are females. This may be because males are preoccupied with socialising with eachother.
SeaWorld has kept dolphins for more than 30 years, but one trainer said they were still surprising them.
'Just when you think you've seen it all, something new comes up,' he said.
'These animals have alot more to teach us.'
Watch the incredible video here...

Race to save 200 whales and dolphins after mass stranding on Tasmanian beach

Rescuers used jet skis and human muscle to save dozens of whales and dolphins stranded on a beach in southern Australia on Monday, officials and news reports said.

The 194 pilot whales and half a dozen bottlenose dolphins became stranded on Naracoopa Beach on Tasmania state's King Island on Sunday evening.

Strandings happen periodically in Tasmania as whales go by during their migration to and from Antarctic waters, but scientists do not know why it happens.

It is unusual, however, for whales and dolphins to get stranded together.

Chris Arthur, of Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service, said 54 whales and seven dolphins were still alive when the rescue effort began. By late Monday, 48 animals had been returned to the sea by officials and more than 100 King Island residents who had volunteered to help.

Backhoes dug trenches in the sand that allowed water to get close to the whales, as volunteers doused them with water and draped wet fabric over them to keep them cool.

Groups of volunteers used stretchers to lug dolphins into the shallows, and other officials used small boats and a jet ski to pull whales out to sea.

Rescuers were hopeful they would stay away from the shore.

'It's too early to say yet but it's been a very, very positive day,' Shelley Davison, a Parks and Wildlife spokeswoman, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

It was not clear why the animals had beached on the island, halfway between Tasmania and mainland Australia. The Examiner, a Tasmanian newspaper, reported that the animals were caught by a very low tide.

In January, 45 sperm whales died after becoming stranded on a remote Tasmanian sandbar, even though rescuers worked for days to keep them cool and wet as they tried to move them back to the open water.

Last November, 150 long-finned pilot whales died after beaching on a rocky coastline in Tasmania. A week earlier, rescuers saved 11 pilot whales among a pod of 60 that had beached on the island state.

Amazing feeding frenzy as sharks, dolphins and gannets gang up on a shoal of sardines

Swirling in panic thousands of silvery sardines flash past as they strive to escape a horde of predators.

While a pod of dolphins chivy the fish into a 'baitball' from beneath, black-tip and tiger sharks marshall them upwards and ganets dive bomb them from above.

As the sardines move in unison towards the surface a feeding frenzy breaks out, with the entire shoal obliterated in minutes.

The incredible spectacle occurs every year off the rugged east coast of South Africa.

Known as the Sardine Run, billions of fish migrate up the KwaZulu-Natal coast in search of tasty cold water zooplankton in June and July.

The fish instinctively group and move together to try and confuse predators but their hunters have honed an impressive technique in which they work together as an unlikely team to pick them off.

Such events once took place regularly in the seas of Europe and the oceans of the Americas but these areas have long since been fished out of sardines.