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the conduit to scientists and specialists that empowers people to protect whales, dolphins and porpoises, their cultures and their homes.
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| words from the wise: Dr David Lusseau |
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I am trying to understand the principles governing the dynamics and evolution of interactions in complex adaptive systems. I am particularly focussing on social interactions in animal populations and I am interested in understanding how environmental variability, both natural and anthropogenic, influences them. |
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Posted: 2007
December 30 |
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Contact http://www.lusseau.org/ |
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| latest wise words |
Evidence for Social Role in a Dolphin Social Network
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.
A note from whales-online.org An open access version of this is available on the ArXiv repository
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Related PDFs
Evidence for Social Role in a Dolphin Social Network |
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