ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Strategic intergroup alliances increase access to a contested resource in male bottlenose dolphins.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neural basis of social hierarchy across species.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Unveiling animal death cognition: the role of social systems.Science China. Life sciences · 2026Article
- Validation of aerial photogrammetry methods to measure body size, condition and mass in small cetaceans.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Close encounters of the friendly kind: pacific between-group interactions in primates.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Social bonds decrease epigenetic age in male bottlenose dolphins.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Allied male dolphins use synchronous displays to strengthen social bonds in a cooperative context.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- Article
- Coalitional Support Regulates Resource Divisions in Men.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2025Article
- Multi-level societies: different tasks at different social levels.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Selective social tolerance drives differentiated relationships among wild female chimpanzees.Animal behaviour · 2024Article
- Smiling underwater: Exploring playful signals and rapid mimicry in bottlenose dolphins.iScience · 2024Article
- In pop pursuit: social bond strength predicts vocal synchrony during cooperative mate guarding in bottlenose dolphins.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- 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
- Lovers, not fighters: docility influences reproductive fitness, but not survival, in male Cape ground squirrels,Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2024Article
- Inter-group alliance dynamics in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- The evolution of intergroup cooperation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Efforts to understand human social evolution rely largely on comparisons with nonhuman primates. However, a population of bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, combines a chimpanzee-like fission-fusion grouping pattern, mating system, and life history with the only nonhuman example of strategic multilevel male alliances. Unrelated male dolphins form three alliance levels, or "orders", in competition over females: both within-group alliances (i.e., first- and second-order) and between-group alliances (third-order), based on cooperation between two or more second-order alliances against other groups. Both sexes navigate an open society with a continuous mosaic of overlapping home ranges. Here, we use comprehensive association and consortship data to examine fine-scale alliance relationships among 121 adult males. This analysis reveals the largest nonhuman alliance network known, with highly differentiated relationships among individuals. Each male is connected, directly or indirectly, to every other male, including direct connections with adult males outside of their three-level alliance network. We further show that the duration with which males consort females is dependent upon being well connected with third-order allies, independently of the effect of their second-order alliance connections, i.e., alliances between groups increase access to a contested resource, thereby increasing reproductive success. Models of human social evolution traditionally link intergroup alliances to other divergent human traits, such as pair bonds, but our study reveals that intergroup male alliances can arise directly from a chimpanzee-like, promiscuous mating system without one-male units, pair bonds, or male parental care.
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