End of Dolphin Alliance Project 2018 Field Season...

PhD student Katy Holmes and her team have just wrapped up the 2018 Dolphin Alliance Project field season. It was a fantastic 5 months of data collection with not only lots of focal follow data collected on juvenile males for Katy's PhD work, but we also documented 87 consortships (allied males herding single oestrus females) and continued to add to our long-term acoustic database on the vocal behaviour of adult male alliances. We also began our first set of playback experiments combined with overhead video to investigate how the strength of an individual's response to another male’s identity signal depends on alliance membership, association strength and consorting history.