We’ve all heard that dogs are a man’s best friend, but our canine companions don’t make up the entirety of humankind’s friend circle. Humans have cooperated with wild animals throughout our evolutionary history, forming reciprocally beneficial relationships known to biologists as mutualisms.
One particularly piscine partnership that made headlines recently can be found in Brazil, where fishers catch nets full of fish with the aid of the local bottlenosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus gephyreus).
This team-up started over a century ago, probably when fishers first noticed that the presence of dolphins was a clue that fish were hiding in the murky water, says Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute in Newport.
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“The dolphins are really good at detecting fish and herding them toward the coast,” he says, “and the fishers are really good at trapping the fish with their net.” Once the fish are mostly secured in the net, the dolphins are sure to snag a few for themselves.
In a study published January 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cantor and colleagues used long-term data to show that the dolphins and fishers respond to cues from the other, and without experienced partners who know the right dance steps, the routine falls apart. “This is a really remarkable and impressive study,” says Pat Shipman, an anthropologist at Penn State University who was not involved with the research.
This fishing partnership is an important part of the cultural identity of both the fishers and the dolphins, but Cantor and his colleagues’ work shows that the practice is in decline. And among human-animal partnerships, it’s…
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