ArticleScientific reports2021
Cooperative partner choice in multi-level male dolphin alliances.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Nest-founding paper wasps aggregate in "social leks" and decrease aggression during partner selection.Current zoology · 2026Article
- Allied male dolphins use synchronous displays to strengthen social bonds in a cooperative context.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- Juvenile social play predicts adult reproductive success in male bottlenose dolphins.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Experiments with a set of cooperative enrichment devices used by groups of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins.Biologia futura · 2024Review
- Olfactory self-recognition in two species of snake.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Inter-group alliance dynamics in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Cooperation increases bottlenose dolphins' (Tursiops truncatus) social affiliation.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Weak, but not strong, ties support coalition formation among wild female chimpanzees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 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
- Social Rank or Social Bonds: Which one Facilitates Coalition Formation in Male Tibetan Macaques?Biology · 2022Article
- The partial merger of two dolphin societies.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Social behavior in farm animals: Applying fundamental theory to improve animal welfare.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2022Review
- The ontogeny of social networks in wild great tits (Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Investigations into cooperative partner choice should consider both potential and realised partners, allowing for the comparison of traits across all those available. Male bottlenose dolphins form persisting multi-level alliances. Second-order alliances of 4-14 males are the core social unit, within which 2-3 males form first-order alliances to sequester females during consortships. We compared social bond strength, relatedness and age similarity of potential and realised partners of individual males in two age periods: (i) adolescence, when second-order alliances are formed from all available associates, and (ii) adulthood, when first-order allies are selected from within second-order alliances. Social bond strength during adolescence predicted second-order alliance membership in adulthood. Moreover, males preferred same-aged or older males as second-order allies. Within second-order alliances, non-mating season social bond strength predicted first-order partner preferences during mating season consortships. Relatedness did not influence partner choice on either alliance level. There is thus a striking resemblance between male dolphins, chimpanzees and humans, where closely bonded non-relatives engage in higher-level, polyadic cooperative acts. To that end, our study extends the scope of taxa in which social bonds rather than kinship explain cooperation, providing the first evidence that such traits might have evolved independently in marine and terrestrial realms.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.