The Dolphin Alliance Culture Project

The Dolphin Alliance Culture Project is a marriage of the two most famous and exciting areas of research on the famous dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia; their multi-level alliances that are the most complex outside of humans and the amazing array of learned cultural behaviors such as using sponges, shells and highly specialized physical maneuvers  (e.g. 'kerplunking') to acquire prey.

New technology such as drones to better observe social and feeding behavior and hydrophone arrays to determine 'who is talking' enable us to explore Alliance Culture in ways that would not have been possible in the past. Read on to find out how you can help...

Shark Bay is a marine biologist's paradise and the best place in the world to learn about dolphin intelligence in the wild.   Boasting the largest seagrass beds in the world, it is the perfect locale for an enormous population of Indo-Pacific Bottlenose dolphins that live in a society whose complexity has astonished the scientists studying them since the 1980’s.  Many animals form alliances or coalitions in competition for food or mates, but The Dolphin Alliance Project discovered that the Shark Bay dolphins form three levels of nested alliances. There is only one other species that does that: humans! Just as humans cooperate with friends against foes, from villages to nation states, the dolphins negotiate a labyrinth of friends, rivals, rival friends and friendly rivals in a system so complex that the word "politics" must be invoked. It is no coincidence that humans and dolphins have the biggest brains in the world and the most complex societies.

OUR MISSION
The Dolphin Alliance Project team is poised to take full advantage of this opportunity by utilizing the newest in technologies to conduct a coordinated study on the role that culture plays in alliance behavior. The core alliance unit in Shark Bay is the 'second-order' alliance of 4-14 males that peers form in their early teens and that will last their lifetimes. These alliances are like stable primate groups except they are all male and embedded in a huge 'open society' with many females and other alliances. 

Finding an alliance home is perhaps the most important task a young male dolphin faces, and a key factor may be finding males with whom you have much in common, such as shared feeding tactics you learned from your mothers. Differences among alliances in shared feeding tactics would be evidence of alliance cultures. Do allied males also share distinct social behavior or vocal repertoires? We will find out!

You can make a difference.  Join our cause and donate in order to make this extraordinary project become a reality!  Donations will go directly towards the purchase of major equipment, including a project ''Alliance Culture' boat, a car, hydrophones, drones and other specialized equipment, PhD student salary supplements, and Field Work Costs, including transportation, food and fuel which will last through the longevity of this ground-breaking study.

All photography provided by The Dolphin Alliance Project