ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Cultural transmission of tool use by Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) provides access to a novel foraging niche.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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10 citing papers in PubMed, 59 citations in OpenAlex.
- Monitoring of wild and rehabilitating dolphin interactions during rehabilitation period using surveillance technologies.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Coupling of coastal activity with tidal cycles is stronger in tool-using capuchins (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Multimodal imitative learning and synchrony in cetaceans: A model for speech and singing evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Association patterns and community structure among female bottlenose dolphins: environmental, genetic and cultural factors.Mammalian biology = Zeitschrift fur Saugetierkunde · 2022Article
- The cultural evolution of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Tool use and social homophily among male bottlenose dolphins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Multi-modal sexual displays in Australian humpback dolphins.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- News Feature: Can animal culture drive evolution?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Preliminary estimates of the abundance and fidelity of dolphins associating with a demersal trawl fishery.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Mitogenomes and relatedness do not predict frequency of tool-use by sea otters.Biology letters · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Culturally transmitted tool use has important ecological and evolutionary consequences and has been proposed as a significant driver of human evolution. Such evidence is still scarce in other animals. In cetaceans, tool use has been inferred using indirect evidence in one population of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.), where particular dolphins ('spongers') use marine sponges during foraging. To date, evidence of whether this foraging tactic actually provides access to novel food items is lacking. We used fatty acid (FA) signature analysis to identify dietary differences between spongers and non-spongers, analysing data from 11 spongers and 27 non-spongers from two different study sites. Both univariate and multivariate analyses revealed significant differences in FA profiles between spongers and non-spongers between and within study sites. Moreover, FA profiles differed significantly between spongers and non-spongers foraging within the same deep channel habitat, whereas the profiles of non-spongers from deep channel and shallow habitats at this site could not be distinguished. Our results indicate that sponge use by bottlenose dolphins is linked to significant differences in diet. It appears that cultural transmission of tool use in dolphins, as in humans, allows the exploitation of an otherwise unused niche.
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