Come dine with me: food-associated social signalling in wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus).

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Abstract

Food-related signalling is widespread in the animal kingdom with some food-associated vocalizations considered functionally referential. Food calls can, however, vary greatly in the type of information they convey. Thus, there are a multitude of purposes for which food calls are used, including social recruitment, caller spacing, the indication of type, quantity, quality, divisibility of food, the caller's hunger level and even as tools to manipulate prey behaviour. Yet little work has focused on the social aspect of food calling in animals. We investigated the association of social signals in wild bottlenose dolphins with foraging behaviour where context-specific food-associated calls are commonly produced. Our data showed that specific social signals were significantly correlated with food call production and these calls rarely occurred in the absence of food calls. We suggest that animals are sharing additional information on the food patch itself with their social affiliates.

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Most cited references 31

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Whistle matching in wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

V Janik (2000)

Dolphin communication is suspected to be complex, on the basis of their call repertoires, cognitive abilities, and ability to modify signals through vocal learning. Because of the difficulties involved in observing and recording individual cetaceans, very little is known about how they use their calls. This report shows that wild, unrestrained bottlenose dolphins use their learned whistles in matching interactions, in which an individual responds to a whistle of a conspecific by emitting the same whistle type. Vocal matching occurred over distances of up to 580 meters and is indicative of animals addressing each other individually.

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Communication in bottlenose dolphins: 50 years of signature whistle research

Vincent Janik, Laela Sayigh (2013)

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Pitfalls in the categorization of behaviour: a comparison of dolphin whistle classification methods.

Rafal Janik (1998)

The categorization of behaviour patterns into separate classes is crucial to the study of animal behaviour. Traditionally researchers have classified behaviour patterns through careful observation by eye. Recently this method has been increasingly replaced by computer methods. While the definition and fine scale analysis that can be achieved with computers is desirable, only a few studies have actually looked at how these methods perform in comparison with human observation. I compared the classification of bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, whistles by human observers with the performance of three computer methods: (1) a method developed by McCowan (1995, Ethology, 100, 177-193); (2) a comparison of cross-correlation coefficients using hierarchical cluster analysis; and (3) a comparison of average difference in frequency along two whistle contours also using hierarchical cluster analysis. The whistle sample consisted of 104 randomly chosen whistles from a group of four captive bottlenose dolphins recorded both during periods when one was separate from the rest of the group and while they all swam in the same pool. The sample contained five individual-specific signature whistles and several nonsignature whistles. Five human observers, without knowledge of the recording context, were more likely than the computer methods to identify signature whistles that were used only while an animal was isolated from the rest of the group. I discuss the limitations of methods commonly used for pattern recognition in communication studies. The discrepancies between methods show how crucial it is to obtain an external validation of the behaviour classes used in studies of animal behaviour. Copyright 1999 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.