Supplementary material from "Dolphin social phenotypes vary in response to food availability but not atmospheric conditions" ...

• Main Authors: Fisher, David N., Cheney, Barbara J.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: The Royal Society 2023
• Subjects: Ecology; FOS Biological sciences; Animal Behaviour; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6856033; https://rs.figshare.com/collections/Supplementary_material_from_Dolphin_social_phenotypes_vary_in_response_to_food_availability_but_not_atmospheric_conditions_/6856033

Social behaviours can allow individuals to flexibly respond to environmental change, potentially buffering adverse effects. However, individuals may respond differently to the same environmental stimulus, complicating predictions for population-level response to environmental change. Here we show that bottlenose dolphins ( Tursiops truncatus ) alter their social behaviour at yearly and monthly scales in response to a proxy for food availability (salmon abundance) but do not respond to variation in a proxy for climate (the North Atlantic Oscillation index). There was also individual variation in plasticity for gregariousness and connectedness to distant parts of the social network, although these traits showed limited repeatability. By contrast, individuals showed consistent differences in clustering with their immediate social environment at the yearly scale but no individual variation in plasticity for this trait at either time scale. These results indicate that social behaviour in free-ranging cetaceans ...