The diet of bottlenose dolphins consists mainly of small fish,
occasionally also squid, crabs, octopus etc. depending the region they
live in. Their peg-like teeth (approximately 88 of them) serve to grasp
but not to chew food. When a shoal of fish is found, the dolphins often
work as a team to keep the fish close together and maximize their
harvest. Sometimes they will employ "fish whacking" whereby a fish is
stunned (and sometimes thrown out of the water) with the fluke to make
catching the fish easier. They also search for fish alone, often bottom
dwelling species. In some estuary regions in the world, it was
registered that bottlenose dolphins drive shoals of fish out of the
water and subsequently strand to catch the fish.
As we can see, these dolphins utilize a large variety of techniques to
capture their prey. They even cooperate with fishermen, driving shoals
of fish into the nets where after the fishermen let the dolphins take
their part of the harvest.