This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.It’s great to have friends. Especially if you’re an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin.Because new research shows that the males who are the most popular with the lads are also the most successful with the ladies.Researchers describe how these affable marine mammals maintain and leverage their complex social connections in a pair of papers in the journal Current Biology.Male dolphins form lifelong cooperative relationships.Stephanie King of the University of Bristol.She’s been studying the dolphin population that inhabits Shark Bay…a UNESCO World Heritage site off the coast of western Australia.By studying populations like the Shark Bay dolphins for many years, we start to see the complex ways they maintain their important social relationships.These connections are more than casual acquaintanceships.They’re crucial for the dolphins to be able to fend off rivals and secure mates.When navigating their social world, it is those males that are more adept at building strong friendships that are ultimately more successful.So what do these aquatic alliances look like?In Shark Bay, every male is embedded in a social network consisting of 4 to 14 males.Livia Gerber of the University of New South Wales, Sydney.These 4 to 14 males are also known as second order alliances and they are the core social unit of the male bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay.
