The Dolphin Alliance Culture Project &
New Technology
It is fair to say that the Alliance Culture project would have been much more difficult or impossible a decade ago, but new technology in almost every area of our research has opened the door for this incredibly exciting project, allowing us to watch and listen to the dolphins much better than we could in the past. We can now use a boat based hydrophone array to tell which dolphin or group of dolphins is ‘talking,’ we can observe social behavior with a consistency and clarity using overhead drones that was impossible from the boat, and we can now observe dolphins feeding in deeper water using specialized echosounders revealing images that are clear enough to identify dolphin movement and types of prey!
Drones
Here we use a drone to watch petting among the Hooligans. Drones, which allow us to view dolphin social behavior in much more detail. will be key tool for our study of dolphin Alliance Culture.
Males in different alliances may use different techniques to guard females. Here allied males surface with the female in the middle of a triangle formation! Drones will allow us to document differences in alliance behavior to a degree that was impossible with boat based observations. We will find out if there are different guarding cultures among alliances!
Hydrophone Arrays
A array of four hydrophones, one in each corner of the boat, allows us to triangulate the location of dolphin vocalizations and so learn which dolphin is talking!
Our first exciting result from this technology was to learn that each male has a ‘name’ whistle, more commonly called a ‘signature whistle’. Pictures in the red boxes are the ‘signature whistles’ for each of 17 males in three buddy alliances, the Kroker Spaniels, the Prima Donnas and the Rascals, that shared a third-order alliance relationship. Each male’s whistle has a distinct frequency contour.