Lifetime Stability of Social Traits in Bottlenose Dolphins

Source: Communications Biology Authors: Taylor Evans, Ewa Krzyszczyk, Céline Frère, Janet Mann Date: 2021-06-18 Venue: Communications Biology 4, article 759

Key points

• Uses 32 years of Shark Bay observations to show that individual social traits remain stable across the lifespan.
• The paper is directly useful for orchestration because it states that this dolphin population lives in a large open fission-fusion system with no clear social hierarchy.
• Group composition changes rapidly, yet stable individual social tendencies and long-lived relationships still exist.
• That combination suggests a coordination style built from persistent identities plus flexible group formation, not from a fixed chain of command.