Schools of dolphins in
Australia’s Shark Bay are well studied. The Shark Bay Dolphin project started
back in 1982 when some scientists stepped out on Monkey Mia beach and found the
bottlenose dolphins were friendly. In fact they would come in to the shallows
to greet the waders and be hand fed.
Now the schools of dolphins
are some of the best studied, but they also have some unusual habits. The
bottlenose dolphins go foraging, as regulations on feeding make sure that they
don’t become spongers on the generosity of tourists in fishing boats.
Foraging, though, has its
hazards. They have to stick their noses into things that other fish wish they
wouldn’t and that can have painful consequences – certainly for the fish. The
Shark Bay schools of dolphins have an answer to that problem. They stick a
sponge on their nose for protection.
It seems that they have
been sponging their noses for some time and Kopps and Sherwin have been
puzzling over how that is taught (1, 2). Is this something that genetics passes
along, or was it something that one clever girl shows the others?
As nobody speaks dolphin,
the next best thing is to simulate how long it would take to produce the
behavior patterns observed in the bay. Computers being wonderful tools, they
cranked out results in short order, but they did not correspond with the actual
observations.
It seems that social
learning is the answer. So we can think of this as schools of dolphins have
home schooling to learn the best sponging techniques. (To catch their own fish,
of course.) Sponging from the tourist voyeurs is a no-no. In any case, sponging
by Shark Bay schools of dolphins has been going on long before the tourists –
about 150 years more or less.
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19909635
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347212003806
