The real-time properties and operational constraints of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged the need for designing energy efficient routing protocols. Recently, software defined network based WSN (SDN-WSN) emerging technology has offered a significant development by untying control logic plane from the low power sensor nodes. This centralized programmable control still suffers from several configuration challenges in distributed sensors environment. Meta-heuristic based SDN approaches had been proposed for the efficient path selection in WSN but they still suffer from both, exploration and exploitation problems. Therefore, this paper addresses these shortcomings by proposing a meta-heuristic based dolphin echolocation algorithm (DEA) for optimizing route selection in WSNs. Objective function of the DEA algorithm is to consider the residual energy of the nodes for selecting energy efficient routes. The proposed algorithm performance is compared with several meta-heuristic algorithms in terms of energy-consumption, and network throughput parameters.