Evidence for social role in a dolphin social network

By David Lusseau. Evolutionary Ecology, 2006

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social animals have to take into consideration the behaviour of conspecifics when making decisions to go by their daily lives. These decisions affect their fitness and there is therefore an evolutionary pressure to try making the right choices. In many instances individuals will make their own choices and the behaviour of the group will be a democratic integration of everyone’s decision. However, in some instances it can be advantageous to follow the choice of a few individuals in the group if they have more information regarding the situation that has arisen. Here I provide early evidence that decisions about shifts in activity states in a population of bottlenose dolphin follow such a decision-making process. This unshared consensus is mediated by a non-vocal signal, which can be communicated globally within the dolphin school. These signals are emitted by individuals that tend to have more information about the behaviour of potential competitors because of their position in the social network. I hypothesise that this decision-making process emerged from the social structure of the population and the need to maintain mixed-sex schools.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12a8164571e0ba49eeffc37c7adf26c193ebd0dc

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Citations in the corpus

Association patterns of African elephants in all-male groups: the role of age and genetic relatedness (2011, methodology): “Centrality measures have been used to demonstrate the social and leadership roles of individuals in animal social networks (Lusseau 2007; Sueur & Petit 2008).”
The emergence of unshared consensus decisions in bottlenose dolphins (2009, methodology): “…53 adult individuals that were observed during this period was composed of 2 social units (Qmax=0.1, Figure 1) in agreement with previous analyses (Newman 2004; Rosvall and Bergstrom 2007; Monni and Li 2008) and observed behavioural variations in the population (Lusseau 2007b; Lusseau et al. 2008).”
Organization of Group Members at Departure Is Driven by Social Structure in Macaca (2008, background): “From the resulting association network, one can determine if a population is divided into subgroups, if strengths of associations differ between individuals, and if some of them occupy a more central role in the life of the group (Lusseau 2007; Lusseau et al. 2006; Whitehead 1997).”
Female bisexual kinship ties maintain social cohesion in a dolphin network (2010, background): “…to bottlenose dolphins include reduced risk of infanticide (Dunn et al. 2002), lower levels of harassment of females by other males (Scott et al. 2005), group defence against predators (Connor 2000) and cooperative foraging leading to greater access to resources (Gazda et al. 2005; Lusseau 2007).”
Social network correlates of food availability in an endangered population of killer whales, Orcinus orca (2012, unknown): “…to investigate such social connectivity in populations provides us with quantitative metrics to describe the social structure at different levels of organization from the individual up to the whole population (Lusseau 2003, 2007; Lusseau & Newman 2004; Croft et al. 2006, 2008; Madden et al. 2009).”
Sociality increases juvenile survival after a catastrophic event in the feral horse (Equus caballus) (2015, unknown): “The number of times each focal animal was observed affected the likelihood that we would detect changes and/or additions to that animal’s social network (see Figure 1a–d) (Gotelli and Colwell 2001; Lusseau 2007).”