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Dear all,
I am pleased to announce the publication of the
following article in Evolutionary Ecology:
Lusseau D. 2006. Evidence for social role in a dolphin social network. (Abstract below). the article will be available
shortly from the journal's website (http://www.springerlink.com/content/1573-8477/) in the OnlineFirst section. A 'no-frill' version is available
from the ArXiv repository website (http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio.PE/0607048).
This paper is one in a series of studies that have
been published over the past three decades which show that dolphin live in
complex societies, have evolved complex social behaviours, and are able to use
non-vocal behavioural events to communicate intention and motivation...
contrarily to what Paul Manger states in his poorly researched and poorly
referenced article recently published in Biological Reviews (2006, 81,
293-338).
best wishes,
David
ABSTRACT
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 all decisions. 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.
David Lusseau, PhD
Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dalhousie University
Department of Biology 1355 Oxford Street Halifax, NS B3H 4J1 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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