Spinner dolphins in a remote Hawaiian atoll: social grouping and population structure

By Leszek Karczmarski, Bernd Würsig, G. Gailey, K. Larson, CYNTHIA A. Vanderlip. 2005

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris) commonly use inshore island and atoll habitats for daytime rest and social interactions and forage over deep waters at night. In Hawaii, they occur throughout the archipelago. We applied photoidentification mark-recapture techniques to study the population structure of spinner dolphins associated with remote Midway Atoll, far-western Hawaii. At Midway, spinner dolphins live in stable bisexually bonded societies of long-term associates, with strong geographic fidelity, no obvious fission-fusion, and limited contacts with other populations. Their large cohesive groups change little over time and are behaviorally/socially discrete from other spinner dolphin groups. This social pattern differs considerably from the fluid fission-fusion model proposed previously for spinner dolphins associated with a large island habitat in the main Hawaiian Archipelago. These differences correspond to geographic separation and habitat variation. While in the main islands there are several daytime resting places available at each island habitat; in far-western Hawaii, areas of suitable habitat are limited and separated by large stretches of open pelagic waters with potentially high risk of shark predation. We hypothesize that with deepwater food resources in close proximity and other atolls relatively far away for easy (day-to-day) access, it is energetically more beneficial in the remote Hawaiian atolls to remain "at home" than to travel to other atolls, so there is stability instead of variability; there is no fission-fusion effect. Thus, the geographic isolation and small size of remote atolls trigger a process in which the fluidity of the fission-fusion spinner dolphin society is replaced with long-term group fidelity and social stability. Copyright 2005.

Subfields: Ecology, Genetics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2eff6de5d85973a2b50c81b5148ab4b3f5b0d7af

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Citations in the corpus

Ranging patterns of bottlenose dolphins living in oceanic waters: implications for population structure (2008, background): “Similarly, spinner dolphins occurring in a remote Hawaiian atoll lived in stable societies and showed strong site Wdelity and restricted movements ( Karczmarski et al. 2005 ).”
Behavioural drivers of the ecological roles and importance of marine mammals (2015, background): “Marine mammals may move nutrients from marine to freshwater habitats, from deep-sea to epipelagic water layers and from marine to terrestrial environments (Kanwisher & Ridgway 1983, Katona & Whitehead 1988, Polis et al. 1997, Roman et al. 2014).”
Costs of group size: lower developmental and reproductive rates in larger groups of leaf monkeys (2008, unknown): “group size becomes too large (Chapman et al. 1995; Henzi et al. 1997; Karczmarski et al. 2005; Wittemyer et al. 2005).”
Female bisexual kinship ties maintain social cohesion in a dolphin network (2010, background): “…presence of stable bisexual bonds in the Doubtful Sound population and in other species living in ‘fissionefusion’ societies (e.g. spinner dolphins, Stenella longirostris, and chimpanzees) appear to be the result of geographical isolation (Boesch 1996; Lusseau et al. 2003; Karczmarski et al. 2005).”
Making protected area networks effective for marine top predators (2011, result): “While the integration of multiple sparse datasets often constitutes the best available science for rare and endangered species (e.g. Karnovsky et al. 2005), the inherent biases of this patchwork approach should be considered and, if possible, tested by contrasting the model results from the…”