Home range overlap, matrilineal and biparental kinship drive female associations in bottlenose dolphins

By C. Frère, Michael Krützen, Janet Mann, J. Watson-Capps, Y. Tsai, Eric M. Patterson, Richard C. Connor, L. Bejder, William Bruce Sherwin. 2010

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Few studies of kinship in mammalian societies have been able to consider the complex interactions between home range overlap, association patterns and kinship, which have created a critical gap in our understanding of social evolution. We investigated the association patterns of female bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops aduncus, in the eastern gulf of Shark Bay, Western Australia and found that they depended upon the complex interplay of at least three factors: home range overlap, matrilineal kinship and biparental kinship. While home range overlap was positively correlated with female association patterns, preferred associations were found between females showing as little as 27% home range overlap, and some pairs showed avoidance despite 100% home range overlap. Furthermore, on average, both casual and preferred associations took place between females that were more closely biparentally related than expected by chance and this pattern varied depending upon whether or not pairs of females shared the same matriline.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43fc1405810a70b7eabdcaf53c4df92488d8464c

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Citations in the corpus

Fission–fusion dynamics in wild giraffes may be driven by kinship, spatial overlap and individual social preferences (2013, background): “For instance, in species such as spotted hyaenas, Crocuta crocuta: African elephants, Loxodonta africana, and dolphins, Tursiops spp., relatedness has been documented to influence the strength and nature of social bonds (Wahaj et al. 2004; Archie et al. 2006; Frère et al. 2010b; Möller 2012).”
Dispersal, philopatry, and the role of fission‐fusion dynamics in bottlenose dolphins (2013, background): “However, Shark Bay dolphins are still more inbred than expected under random mating, especially given dolphin mobility (Frère et al. 2010a).”
Evidence of social communities in a spatially structured network of a free-ranging shark species (2012, background): “…for spatial use has been widely investigated among terrestrial predators (Sandell 1989; Atwood & Weeks 2003; Wagner et al. 2008) and marine mammals (Lusseau et al. 2006; Wiszniewski et al. 2009; Frère et al. 2010), such information is still missing in most large, free-ranging, marine fish.”
Statistical inference for home range overlap (2018, background): “Furthermore, overlap can be used to underpin analyses of social network structure (Frère et al., 2010) and contact rates, with implications for disease transmission (Dougherty, Seidel, Carlson, Spiegel, & Getz, 2018; Sanchez & Hudgens, 2015).”