The male alliances hold the key for understanding the two most important issues of dolphin culture in Shark Bay:

1) if the dolphins have a ‘broad’ culture based on multiple types of social learning, and

2) how resilient the dolphin population will be to climate change.

Animal culture is based on social learning, and there are three major routes along which information can be learned, from your mother (vertical), friends and acquaintances (horizontal) and older non-relatives (oblique). For our purposes, we will use the term horizontal for all behaviors you learn from dolphins other than your mother. We know that learning from mothers is very important for dolphin foraging tactics (e.g. sponging) and we know that one specialized feeding behavior (shelling) is transmitted horizontally.

However, we do not know if horizontal transmission is widespread among the dolphins and that is very important for two reasons.

If horizontal transmission is widespread we can place the dolphins in the company of few other species, like chimpanzees, that have diverse cultures that individuals can learn from many others.

Even more important is understanding how resilient the Shark Bay dolphins will be to climate change. As the climate changes so does your food supply and if you are stuck with behaviors your learned from your mother you may not be able to adapt as easily to hunting new fish species in different ways. On the other hand, if you are adept at learning new tricks from other dolphins, you have a much better chance of being able to cope with a changing ecosystem.

Why does the study of male alliances hold the key to understanding culture in dolphins? If you study female cultural variation it will be very difficult to determine whether behaviors and vocalizations are learned from females other than your mother. Males, however, have a suite of behaviors and vocalizations they produce during consorsthips that females never perform and so males can’t learn them from their mothers! By examining alliance specific variation in these behaviors and sounds, we will discover if horizontal transmission is widepread in the Shark Bay dolphins!