In 1982 Richard Connor and Rachel Smolker traveled to Shark Bay, Western Australia, hitchhiking from Perth carrying small tents, cameras and hand-rolled black and white film, to investigate the bay’s potential for learning about a wild dolphin society. Richard and Rachel did not have a boat, focusing their observations on the several dolphins that visited the shallows at Monkey Mia each day to accept fish from people. However, for two days in October they explored the bay in a borrowed ‘tinny’, discovering that those several hand-fed dolphins were part of a huge society of dolphins who were completely tame around the boat. The incredible potential of the place was obvious.
In the 1980s, following wild dolphins for the first time, the incredible potential of Shark Bay was revealed as we watched alliances of male dolphins swimming leisurely, undisturbed by our small boats. Note the amazing synchrony in the video, which would become a focus of our studies and which we will examine in The Dolphin Alliance Culture Project.
In the 1980s we learned that dolphins often ride the bow upside down, enabling us to determine their sex, although that sometimes required some effort to get in the right position to see their genitals.
Shark Bay turned out to be the “Rosetta Stone” for learning about dolphin intelligence in the wild. For his PhD project at the University of Michigan, Richard discovered a system of multi-level male alliances that was unprecedented outside of humans. This discovery was published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and earned a headline article in the New York Times, Science Times and has led to numerous breakthrough studies on the alliances that reveal the remarkable social intelligence of dolphins. Recent landmark papers include the discovery that dolphin alliances have a concept of ‘team’ and another paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the Shark Bay dolphin alliance network is the largest in the world outside of humans and the only non-human example of cooperation between stable social groups!
During the ensuing decades researchers from many countries and institutions have come to Shark Bay to investigate the remarkable dolphin population, including females, infant development and a wide range of questions about dolphin behavior and ecology. Mike Heithaus was 19 when he first came to Shark Bay as Richard’s assistant on The Dolphin Alliance Project in 1994. He then continued to work with Richard for the next two years before starting, with Canadian professor Larry Dill, what grew into the Shark Bay Ecosystem Project, learning about other animals, plants and the relationships between species.
In the late 1990s, Michael Krutzen, working with Professor Bill Sherwin at UNSW, bought genetics to the project, and in 2007 started a new project with Simon Allen in the Western Gulf of Shark Bay. The ‘Dolphin Innovation Project’ as they called it, made a series of key discoveries about dolphin culture in Shark Bay.
Why dolphins occasionally surface with large shells remained a mystery until a dolphin project in the Western Gulf, started by researchers Michael Krutzen and Simon Allen, captured remarkable images of dolphins shaking fish out of the shell. Shelling and ‘sponging’ observations in the Western Gulf led to important breakthroughs in our understanding of dolphin culture.
Having made ground-breaking discoveries on dolphin communication during her Ph.D.studies in Scotland, Stephanie King joined the project in 2015, bringing state-of-the-art methods in the study of dolphin communication. Then In 2017 the Dolphin Alliance Project and Dolphin Innovation projects partnered under the umbrella ‘Shark Bay Dolphin Research,’ (SBDR) working in the both gulfs, in keeping with the name given by the traditional Malgana owners, ‘Gathaagudu,’ which means ‘two waters.’ The Dolphin Alliance Project continues as a ‘subsidiary’ of SBDR, maintaining the original focus on the remarkable male alliances, but data are shared with all SBDR members. The Dolphin Alliance Project is now raising funds for an ambitious multi-year project on Alliance Culture.
Stephanie King is revolutionizing studies in dolphin communication using the new technology that will lead to more breakthrough discoveries in The Dolphin Decade