Just like humans, dolphins can suffer from skin irritations and disease – a problem that seems to be getting worse as oceans get warmer. Fortunately, they’ve found their own way of treating them and new research suggests it could amount to a form of medicine.
Angela Ziltener of Switzerland’s University of Zurich leads a team studying a group of 360 bottlenose dolphins that live in the Red Sea off the east coast of Egypt. The team noticed that dolphins would often queue up to rub themselves on various corals. This could have just been a way of soothing irritated skin but Ziltener began to wonder if there was more to it. The dolphins seemed to prefer certain coral species and to single out specific corals for rubbing particular parts of…
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The Week Junior (Digital) - 1 Issue, 339