Announcing major new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences!

We are thrilled to announce our new paper demonstrating yet again that Shark Bay is the best place to learn about dolphin intelligence in the wild! We show that the dolphins have the largest non-human alliance network known and that intergroup alliances, previously known in humans only, are important for male success! See articles in The Guardian, The Times and Science! Join our team by making a donation today!

Here is the article from Science! Read what the world’s top primatologists say about our new study!

Here is an article from The Guardian! and another from The Times!

The 40th Anniversary of Shark Bay Dolphin Research

Here are pictures of happy enthusiastic dolphin researchers in Shark Bay, our new Research Station courtesy of the University of Zurich and the RAC, and the Monkey Mia team celebrating the 40th anniversary of dolphin research in Shark Bay!

In 2023 Richard’s graduate student Whitney Friedman published her thesis work on the dynamics of Third-order alliance relationships. With this key paper we have now described the structure and function of all three alliance levels, and have shown that all three levels of theses cooperative relationships are maintained by friendly social bonds that include touching behavior (‘petting’), which functions like primate grooming and human hugs! With this paper in place, and our new technology, we are poised to greatly advance our work on social interactions, communication and culture to learn more about Dolphin Intelligence in the Wild!

In 2024, somewhat remarkably, we had yet another paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! Katy Holmes, Stephanie King’s Ph.D. student showed that juvenile play behavior predicted adult male reproductive success, the first time such a link has been made in mammals! Read about our discovery in Science!