ArticleScientific reports2017
Male alliance behaviour and mating access varies with habitat in a dolphin social network.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Acoustic Identity: Linking Signature Whistles and Visual Identification in a Threatened Dolphin Population.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Experiments with a set of cooperative enrichment devices used by groups of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins.Biologia futura · 2024Review
- The Cetacean Sanctuary: A Sea of Unknowns.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- Inter-group alliance dynamics in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Strategic intergroup alliances increase access to a contested resource in male bottlenose dolphins.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Testing use of the first multi-partner cognitive enrichment devices by a group of male bottlenose dolphins.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Group size, partner choice and collaborative actions in male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus).Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Association patterns and community structure among female bottlenose dolphins: environmental, genetic and cultural factors.Mammalian biology = Zeitschrift fur Saugetierkunde · 2022Article
- Cognitive enrichment device provides evidence for intersexual differences in collaborative actions in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus).Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Kea, Nestor notabilis, achieve cooperation in dyads, triads, and tetrads when dominants show restraint.Learning & behavior · 2021Article
- Group structure and kinship in beluga whale societies.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Vocal behaviour of allied male dolphins during cooperative mate guarding.Animal cognition · 2019Article
- Multi-modal sexual displays in Australian humpback dolphins.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Affiliation history and age similarity predict alliance formation in adult male bottlenose dolphins.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Selfish partners: resource partitioning in male coalitions of Asiatic lions.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 6 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Within-species variation in social structure has attracted interest recently because of the potential to explore phenotypic plasticity and, specifically, how demographic and ecological variation influence social structure. Populations of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops spp.) vary in male alliance formation, from no alliances to simple pairs to, in Shark Bay, Western Australia, the most complex nested alliances known outside of humans. Examination of ecological contributions to this variation is complicated by differences among populations in other potentially explanatory traits, such as phylogenetic distance, as well as female reproductive schedules, sexual size dimorphism, and body size. Here, we report our discovery of systematic spatial variation in alliance structure, seasonal movements and access to mates within a single continuous social network in the Shark Bay population. Participation in male trios (versus pairs), the sizes of seasonal range shifts and consortship rates all decrease from north to south along the 50 km length of the study area. The southern habitat, characterised by shallow banks and channels, may be marginal relative to the open northern habitat. The discovery of variation in alliance behaviour along a spatial axis within a single population is unprecedented and demonstrates that alliance complexity has an ecological component.
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