The Dolphin ALLIANCE CULTURE Project

Team Leaders

Our team leaders on The Dolphin ALLIANCE CULTURE Project offer an extraordinary level of talent and experience in behavior, population biology, ecology and communication.  Together with Masters students, Ph.D. students, Post-doctoral fellows and collaborators at other universities, we are poised for a future of exciting scientific discovery about culture among dolphin alliances!

Dr. Richard Connor

Courtesy Professor at Florida International University; Professor Emeritus at UMASS Dartmouth, USA; Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western australia.

Richard C. Connor, Ph.D., co-founded the dolphin research in Shark Bay in 1982 and is a co-director of The Dolphin Alliance Project (DAP). After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1990, Dr. Connor held post-doctoral positions at Harvard, The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, The Michigan Society of Fellows and The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Dr. Connor taught for 24 years at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth before retiring to focus on research at FIU. Beginning with his first scientific paper on dolphin altruism, co-authored with Professor Kenneth S. Norris in 1982, Dr. Connor has published over 100 articles on the Shark Bay dolphins, general aspects of dolphin behavior and evolution, and on the evolution of cooperation and mutualism. His research has been featured numerous times in the media, including National Geographic and Nova documentaries and The New York Times. 

The main focus of Prof. Connor’s work has been dolphin behaviour and the males’ alliance relationships. He examines the alliance relationships from a broad, comparative perspective and has developed new theory on alliance formation and cooperation in general.  He led work that underpins the Dolphin Alliance Culture Project, showing that alliances with broadly overlapping ranges nonetheless hunt for fish in different kinds of habitats! Dr. Connor has recently published: Dolphin Politics in Shark Bay: A Journey of Discovery.  In this book,  Dr. Connor brings the reader on board for the drama, the discoveries and the insights that have revealed the astonishing, often sexual and sometimes violent, social lives of dolphins.

Dr. Mike Heithaus

Florida International University

 Mike Heithaus, Ph.D., started working with Richard Connor in
 Shark Bay in 1994 and co-founded the Shark Bay Ecosystem
 Research Project in 1997.  He received his Ph.D. from Simon
 Fraser University in 2001, then served as a post-doctoral
 scientist and then staff scientist at the Center for Shark
 Research at Mote Marine Laboratory.  He also was a fellow
 in the Remote Imaging Laboratory at the National Geographic
 Society.  Dr. Heithaus has been on the faculty at Florida
 International University since 2003, where he is a Professor
 of Biology and the Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences
 & Education. The work of Dr. Heithaus and his lab has
 focused on predator-prey interactions in marine ecosystems
 and the ecological roles and importance of sharks and other
 large marine animals including marine mammals,
 elasmobranchs, sea turtles, sirenians and crocodilians.  He
 has published 150 articles and book chapters and he has been
 involved in the development of numerous documentaries for
 the National Geographic Channel and Discovery.  He also has
 developed video-based projects for K-12 classrooms.  Dr.
 Heithaus' work in Shark Bay has focused on the role of
 predation risk from tiger sharks in shaping dolphin habitat
 use patterns and the importance of tiger sharks in shaping
 the dynamics of the bay by scaring their prey, especially
 sea turtles and dugongs.

Dr. Stephanie King

Bristol University, UK; University of Western Australia

Dr. Stephanie King is an Associate Professor at the University of Bristol, UK, and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests lie in understanding the role vocal communication plays in mediating complex social behaviours, such as cooperation, in animal systems and human society. The nested structure of male alliance formation found in the Shark Bay dolphin population provides a unique opportunity to understand the interplay between vocal communication and cooperative strategies. She is using a hydrophone array, overhead video and sound playback experiments to explore the role of communication in the formation and maintenance of male alliances, and the communicative strategies these males employ when making decisions of when and with whom to cooperate.

Much of Dr. King’s earlier work has involved logistically challenging field experiments with bottlenose dolphins. She obtained the first evidence of a non-human mammal using learned signals, ‘signature whistles’ as labels for individuals (published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), and demonstrated that the copying of signature whistles in dolphins has parallels with human language usage, where the maintenance of social bonds appears to be more important than the immediate defence of resources (published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B). More recently in Shark Bay, Dr. King led experiments using playbacks of signature whistles to show that males perceive their fellow allies as team members and that they use whistle exchanges to bond with allies who are important but with whom they spend less time than their closest associates.

Dr. King’s research has received worldwide media coverage and has been the focus of TV documentaries (BBC’s Britain’s Secret Seas and Winterwatch), radio broadcasts (BBC, ABC and NPR) and has featured in many high-profile science magazine articles (e.g. New Scientist, Scientific American, and National Geographic, amongst many others).