Dolphin Intelligence in the Wild:

Social interactions and communication

Our studies of the three levels of dolphin alliances have shown that Shark bay is home to the most complex animal society on the planet outside of humans. Until recently there were two key areas social intelligence that were hard to study: social behavior and communication.

Now thanks to two key technical advances we are making huge advances in both areas!! First, for decades we could listen with our single hydrophones (an underwater microphone) but not tell who was talking, because sound travels so fast underwater. Now with boat-based hydrophone arrays we can tell who is talking. The first research Stephanie King did with the array was show that each male dolphin had a unique ‘signature’ whistle, which functions like a human name. That, in turn, opened to door for playback experiments where we play back an individual’s whistles or other sounds to other dolphins to see how they react.

Playback experiments are a way to ask dolphins directly what their sounds mean. We found, for example, that the males respond more strongly to the whistles of their second compared to third-order allies. This wasn’t surprising except relationships between males vary a huge amount in second-order alliances and the males response to the whistles of others in their group even when they were not great friends. It showed that males value all second-order allies as team members!

How did we see how males responded to hearing their friend’s whistles? With the second big advance, drones! In the past we had been restricted to what we should see from our small boats, and that was pretty limited, but drones give us a clear picture of what dolphins are doing when they are within a few meters of the surface.  So we put the drone over the dolphins, play a whistle to them as they are moving away and we can see their instantaneous reaction!

Power and Influence in dolphin alliance relationships

With drones and hydrophone arrays we will launch an exiting study on POWER and INFLUENCE in dolphin alliances! We know that some males do much better than others in the same alliance; spending more time with females and siring more offspring. In many animals success would be determined by simple fighting ability, leading to dominance relationships. But dolphins are never interacting without allies around and those alliance relationships within and between groups will play a big role in determining who wins the reproductive sweepstakes. We will learn how social interactions and communication, such as how who pets who and how they touch each other, as well as patterns of synchony and coordination, and which dolphins exchange whistles and who initiates the exchange, to understand how dolphins use friendly interactions to acheive and maintain power in alliances and whether those with more power have greater influence in alliances with other groups; e.g. third-order alliance relationships. Do males with more power in groups play a bigger role in maintaining third order alliance relationships? If all of this sounds like human politics, that is for a good reason! Only humans and dolphins have levels of alliances within a society and friendly, cooperative relations with other groups. Studies of human relationships and politics have been conducted in many cultures but in Shark Bay we can study them in another species—the one with the largest brain outside of our own! Join us in this exciting endeavor!