Researchers discover playful dolphins grow up to be better dads

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

Male bottlenose dolphins who play together as youngsters father more calves as adults, reveals new research.

Juvenile social play with their future "wingmen" predicts adult reproductive success in the species, say scientists.

Researchers from the University of Bristol and the University of Western Australia found that young male dolphins with strong social bonds practice "adult-like" reproductive behavior when playing together.

The juvenile males who spend more time practicing will father more offspring as adults, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The researchers say their findings provide rare evidence for a link between juvenile social play and reproductive success in a wild animal.

The team spent years observing the behavior of juvenile male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia.

Lead author Dr. Katy Holmes said: “We found that juvenile play involves immature versions of adult reproductive behaviors that are crucial for males to access and mate with estrous females, and the time spent doing these play behaviors predicts how many offspring males eventually sire as adults.”

She explained that adult male dolphins in Shark Bay form long-term alliances to help each other secure access to females - and these alliances are formed between males who were closely bonded as juveniles.

As adults, pairs or trios of allied males will coordinate their behavior to consort individual females, and the research shows that young males practice the coordination with their likely future allies, years before they become sexually mature.

Dr. Holmes, who completed the work as part of her doctoral research at the University of Western Australia, said: “Our work is exciting because historically it has been notoriously difficult to link play behavior to reproductive success, in this case the number of sired offspring, in wild animals."

Senior author Dr. Stephanie King, Associate Professor from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “Play behavior is widespread in humans and other animals, but the reasons that animals play together have long remained a mystery."

She added: "This study provides compelling support for the idea that animals in the wild play together to practice behaviors that will be important for them as adults, and that if they practice enough, they will be more successful as adults.”