Zzzzzzzzzzzzz, zzzzzzzzzzzzz, zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Frozen in place, I was standing in knee-deep water in the Monkey Mia shallows, recording equipment hanging over my shoulder. Sicklefin had his open jaws poised around the calf of my leg and was emitting a crazy, screeching, cicadalike buzz that I had never before heard coming from any dolphin. In combination with the flash of his many fine, pointed teeth, I was reminded of a chain saw. This was obviously a test. If either one of us flinched, I would end up with a bloody, shredded leg. His teeth, though not particularly long, were sharp and plentiful, and I had developed a healthy respect for them. Bibi approached, attracted by the sound, and joined Sicklefin in his antics. Now both of them, tense and twitchy, eyes wide, ran their open jaws up and down my legs, Zzzzzzzz, zzzzzzz, zzzzzzz. They sounded like air raid sirens. I tried to remain calm, and after a minute or so they moved off, attention diverted by the approach of a tourist. Whew, saved by a bucket of fish.
It was the spring of 1987, and Richard and I had just returned to Monkey Mia together, having spent several months once again back in the United States. A friend had offered to pay my way back to Australia, where I helped him to restore and sell a house in Perth. But more than anything, I had longed to get back to Monkey Mia. Working as Richard’s assistant was my ticket.
When we arrived, we found Sicklefin among the tourists. He had joined the ranks of the hand-fed Monkey Mia dolphins. In prior years he had come into the shallows occasionally and seemed fairly relaxed about people, but he never accepted fish handouts or allowed anyone to touch him. But now he was acting like an old hand: head out of the water, mouth open, he gulped down fish offerings held out to him by human hands in the blink of an eye.
From the ranger’s reports and our own observations in the first few days, it became clear that Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin together were coming in to Monkey Mia accompanied by an offshore dolphin almost every day. Some of the dolphins they brought with them were strangers to us. The intense following, chasing, genital inspections, and knocking sounds we had seen and heard once or twice during the previous field season were now a daily occurrence, and the dramas were taking place right here in the shallows at Monkey Mia. Now we might begin to make sense of it.
Over the following months we determined the sexes of many of the dolphins that came in with the males: all were female. Sometimes Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin brought in the same female for a week or so, and at other times they came in with a different one from day to day. While in the Monkey Mia shallows, one of the males “stood guard,” remaining farther offshore with the female and often forgoing fish handouts while the other males ate.
The knocking sound was incessant. Richard and I began to take note of the female’s behavior in response to these vocalizations, and we soon realized that she would almost always turn toward and approach the knocking male. If she did not comply, or didn’t do so fast enough, the knocking escalated into furious outbursts of screaming, accompanied by jerking head motions, charging, chasing, and hitting. It was as if he were saying “Stick by me or else.…”
The strutting display we had seen Cetus perform to Yogi turned out to be just one of a bizarre array of displays that the males performed. Many were performed by two males moving in perfect synchrony. They might start out side by side and behind the female (“flanking” her), then zoom up, one on either side, tilting their bellies toward her. Then they would both slap their chins down against the water surface, followed by an exaggerated tail-out dive, bringing their tails way out of the water and slapping the surface as they submerged. Underwater they would circle around to reapproach her, resuming the flanking position from which they had started. Or they might leap alongside her, each going in the opposite direction before circling back alongside her.
Another time I watched as both Snubnose and Bibi swam along on their sides next to each other, both wildly waving a pectoral fin in the air. They looked just like circus dolphins performing a show trick. The sheer variety of these stunts was mind-boggling, especially so because they were performed in such a perfectly coordinated way. How did they do it? There was no obvious leader and follower. Did they somehow discuss what they were going to do beforehand? It was difficult to tell much of the time whether these displays were performed for the sake of impressing the female or for the sake of the participating males themselves. Sometimes they went through elaborate displays even when there was no female around, leading us to suspect they might serve to demonstrate and enhance male-male solidarity.
When we followed them as they traveled offshore, away from the Monkey Mia shallows, Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin traveled in perfect synchrony, surfacing and diving together in a rank abreast formation directly behind the female. Even in the shallows, the males moved with precise coordination, as if they were linked by some invisible electronic connection. Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin were united in their purpose, and their purpose, apparently, was to impose themselves upon these females.
Richard and I settled into a routine. In the morning we watched Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin with whichever female they brought with them, and in the afternoon, weather permitting, we headed offshore to check up on the offshore dolphins. Most days we encountered the Red Cliff Bay male gangs (Chop, Bottomhook, and Lamda; Trips, Bite, and Cetus; Realnotch, Patches, Hack, and Hi; and the others). Usually one or more of these gangs also had a female with them. Out in the deeper water, we couldn’t see what was going on below the surface as well, but what we did see fit the same patterns we were observing with Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin: males traveling in a synchronous rank abreast behind the female, the knocking sound, occasional charges, and hitting and splashing. If it hadn’t been for Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin carrying on in the shallows at Monkey Mia, it might have taken many more years for us to begin to make sense of the behavior of the males.
Richard was the first to really understand the theoretical implications of what we were seeing. He had been immersed in evolutionary theory at the University of Michigan and so was primed to think about animal behavior in terms of the costs and benefits (in terms of reproductive success) of conflict and cooperation. He recognized how unusual it is in the animal kingdom to find males cooperating with one another, and his excitement and enthusiasm about it were contagious.
Later during that summer we had a visit from three scientists, all of them among my all-time heroes in the study of animal behavior. Irv DeVore, chair of the Anthropology Department at Harvard, had pioneered the study of nonhuman primates in the early 1960s, as well as ethnological studies of the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari and Pygmies of Central Africa. Richard Wrangham, a professor at the University of Michigan, had studied the ecological bases of behavior in chimpanzees at Jane Goodall’s Gombe Stream Reserve and had just received a MacArthur Award. Barb Smuts, also a professor at the University of Michigan, had worked at Gombe and had written a fascinating and important book entitled Sex and Friendship in Baboons. These three visitors injected our dolphin watching with a new energy, a sense of validation, and leadership in developing solid scientific methods for observing the dolphins.
Richard Wrangham and Barb Smuts were on Richard Connor’s Ph.D. committee. Excited by what they saw of the behavior of the male dolphins, they suggested that he focus on male behavior for his thesis. They agreed to help Andrew and me to get into graduate school and develop our own thesis research, but they felt we needed to slice up the research pie to avoid overlap and potential interference so that ultimately we could all complete good, focused doctoral research. I was fascinated by the complexities of the behavior of males, and we were clearly poised on the brink of some important discoveries. So it was with some reluctance that I accepted this arrangement. I eventually decided to focus my thesis research on the dolphins’ acoustic communication, and Andrew focused on female social relationships. The project took on a new dimension now with independent projects and more clearly defined research boundaries and goals. But I still spent much of my time watching males, usually by collaborating with Richard.
During the next couple of years, virtually every day revealed new and yet more amazing complexities to the dynamic relationships among males. We eventually referred to the stable male gangs as “alliances” because of the cooperative nature of their behavior. The males cooperated to “herd” females. Herding typically began with the males choosing a female, often separating her from her companions and even chasing her aggressively. They performed displays around her, swam in a tight rank formation just behind her, and frequently made the knocking vocalization. Sometimes they inspected her genital area or mounted her. Herding was often an aggressive affair. The males would jerk their heads and scream at the female they were herding, and frequently that escalated into chasing and even hitting her. The female usually ended up staying with the males for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks.
Most male alliances were triplets, with some pairs. Yet when they were herding a female, only two of the three members of a triplet seemed to be really involved. The third rarely made the knocking sound and made no special effort to remain close to the female. He was unlikely to participate in the synchronized displays or take up rank formation behind the herded female. Instead he hung around on the outskirts of the activity, usually foraging: the odd man out.
If the female bolted, trying to escape from the males, the odd man out would join the chase, but otherwise he seemed to be just standing by. Each time a triplet herded a different female, the odd man out might change, although some males were more often the odd member of their triplet.
It was easy to tell who was odd. Males typically traveled together in a rank abreast formation, surfacing to breathe in perfect unison, except for the odd man out, who was just out of step and often slightly farther apart than the other two. Just by watching how the dolphins moved with respect to one another, we could discern something of their relationships.
We also noticed that each of the male alliances we knew in Red Cliff Bay cultivated a special relationship with another alliance. Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin spent a considerable amount of time with Wave and Shave. Trips, Bite, and Cetus spent a lot of time with Chop, Bottomhook, and Lamda and, more recently, with Realnotch and Hi. These second-order alliances traveled together or nearby, and they often petted and formed synchronous surfacing pairs involving males from the two different alliances. Occasionally males from second-order alliances even paired up to herd a female together.
It was remarkable enough that males cooperated in pairs and triplets, but why should they then also form bonds with other pairs and triplets? One particularly memorable day of dolphin watching revealed insights into the politics of male alliances that we had never imagined.
It was August 19, 1988, a day that none of us will ever forget. It looked from the onset to be a good boat day: calm and clear. But before heading out on the boats, we wanted to see what the Monkey Mia dolphins were up to. Walking down to the beach that morning, Richard and Andrew and I could see from a distance that something was up. Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin were in, and whatever was going on, it was exciting, with lots of splashing and fast action. I could hear dolphins squealing even way up on the beach.
When we got down to the water’s edge, Dave Charles, the ranger on duty, filled us in. “Holeyfin is back, and the guys are pretty keen on her.” Indeed, the males were paying no attention whatsoever to the twenty or so tourists who were wading in and out of the water with fish in hand. Instead they were surfacing in a tight, tense, synchronous rank behind Holeyfin. She hadn’t visited the Monkey Mia shallows for the past several days, and we had seen her several times offshore with the male alliance of Chop, Bottomhook, and Lamda.
Holly was four years old now, old enough to be pretty much independent of her mother, so Holeyfin was probably ready and able to get pregnant again. By examining our records, we determined that herded females were usually those who were not pregnant and didn’t currently have young infants: precisely the females in the population who could become pregnant. Holeyfin was ready, and she had been attracting a lot of attention from the males in the bay lately.
Female dolphins are seasonally polyestrous, meaning that during a broadly defined breeding season—the austral summer in Shark Bay—females go through several hormonal cycles in which they ovulate and become fertile. They continue to go through these estrous cycles until they become pregnant. Because they have a one-year gestation period, the birthing season coincides with the mating season. We have no idea how males know, but somehow they are able to discern when a female is cycling. We had seen males “inspecting” the genitals of females they herded, and we suspected that they might be capable of “looking inside” with their echolocation and somehow assessing the state of her reproductive organs.
In many species of mammals, females exude distinctive odors or pheromones that signal to males when they are able to become pregnant. Among primates, many species sport huge red-and-purple “sexual swellings” of the labia and surrounding tissues that come and go with the female’s cycle, peaking during the day or so when she is ovulating and most likely to become pregnant. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have particularly grotesque and exaggerated sexual swellings. Female chimps at the peak of their cycle have trouble sitting down, their bottoms are so swollen. Though chimpanzee sexual swellings appear hideous to our eyes, male chimpanzees find them highly attractive, and they have presumably evolved as a means for females to signal that they are ready to become pregnant.
We differ markedly from our chimpanzee cousins when it comes to signaling estrus. We have no external signals, no apparent odor or visual signal. In fact, neither men nor women know when a woman is ovulating. But male dolphins, whatever the means, seem to know when to court a female. No sooner was Holeyfin back from her week-long adventure offshore with Chop, Bottomhook, and Lamda than Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin took an interest in her. I felt a bit sorry for the old girl. Perhaps she was enjoying all this attention, but then again, after several days offshore away from her usual routine, she might just be tired and hungry. Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin were not exactly easygoing company.
Followed closely by the males, Holeyfin joined Puck and took up a position right alongside her, so close that their pectoral fins touched. As Sicklefin snagged at the surface, Holeyfin and Puck both took turns diving and tilting alongside him so that his pectoral fin rubbed down the length of their sides. They each took two passes, while Sicklefin hung motionless, seemingly aloof or perhaps just blissed out. The females then snagged alongside him. We had seen females rub like this along a male’s pectoral fin many times before, and I was always unsure whether she was being genuinely affectionate or just appeasing him, trying to impress him with her undying devotion in an attempt to avoid escalated harassment and aggression.
Snubnose and Sicklefin followed every move Holeyfin made, staying close to and usually just behind her. Twice they rushed up toward Holeyfin from behind and tilted sideways as they dove underneath her, both angling their heads toward her genital area and buzzing intently, inspecting her genital area.
Snubnose did the strut display, swimming tight circles around Holeyfin, arching his back so that his head jutted upward out of the water and bobbing his head up and down rhythmically so that his chin slapped down against the water with each stroke. While doing this, he emitted a steady stream of air through his blowhole: a gurgly, buzzing sound. To me he looked pretty ridiculous, but I suppose he figured he looked pretty cool. Maybe Holeyfin was impressed.
Richard and I were busily absorbed in recording our observations. I had a hydrophone in the water, recording the dolphins’ vocalizations, and Richard was babbling as fast as he could into his tape recorder, describing the dolphins’ behavior. During a momentary lull in the activity, we looked up from our work long enough to realize that two other dolphins were present. It was Trips and Bite, two of the males from the Trips, Bite, and Cetus triplet alliance. This was a rare event. Only once before had we seen Trips and Bite so close to shore at Monkey Mia. They were offshore dolphins, yet here they were, just twenty feet from shore. They floated quietly, oriented directly toward Snubnose, Bibi, Sicklefin, and Holeyfin, who seemed completely oblivious of their presence.
I waded out toward Trips and Bite in hopes of getting an opportunity to record some sounds from them. Even when I was right next to them, they showed no sign of acknowledgment. They just hung there, bobbing gently on the rippled surface. The sun glinted off their exposed foreheads, and I was close enough to see that they both had their eyes squinted partly shut. It was a thrill to be in the water so close to these wild males. I had often hung over the bow of our boat as they rode just a few inches from my face, but somehow being in their element with them made me more aware of their size and power. They were completely silent and almost gave the impression of being at rest, except that they kept turning slightly, readjusting to remain oriented toward Snubnose, Bibi, Sicklefin, and Holeyfin. They were obviously “casing the joint.”
When, after about half an hour, Trips and Bite headed offshore, not in any great rush but traveling directly, surfacing side by side in synchrony, Richard backed out of the water. “Something’s up. I’m gonna follow them out.” Andrew and I agreed to stay on shore and keep an eye on Snubnose, Bibi, Sicklefin, and Holeyfin. Richard quickly loaded up his boat and headed out after Trips and Bite, with his assistant, Eric, at the wheel. I watched the boat grow smaller as they headed out to the northern horizon.
Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin were following Holeyfin around, displaying and carrying on like a gang of punks harassing the neighborhood nerd, when Richard’s voice came in over the radio. “Look out, here we come.” Looking out toward the north, we saw Richard’s boat not one hundred yards from shore, and just in front of the boat were at least five or six dolphins, in a wide rank, surging toward shore like a tidal wave. One or two of the dolphins leapt out of the water as they came rushing in to the Monkey Mia shallows. Then all hell broke loose.
As they swept in to the shallows, I heard horrible nasty growling and grunting sounds, like a group of lions attacking a family of warthogs. Snubnose, Bibi, Sicklefin, and Holeyfin took off at top speed to the west, and the others followed. A huge chase ensued, but they were all moving so fast that it was difficult to tell who was chasing whom. I heard the dull thwacking sounds of dolphins hitting each other, but soon they were out of range of my hydrophone and away down the beach.
Richard and Eric followed along, furiously trying to keep track of who was where. Finally Richard reported back over the radio. “This is like science-fucking-fiction!” he exclaimed. “Trips and Bite went out north and joined up with Cetus, and then the three of them joined up with Realnotch and Hi, who are herding Munch. Then all of them together came steaming straight back in here and stole Holeyfin from Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin. She’s with them now, and Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin are hanging back behind.”
It was beginning to make sense now. Trips and Bite had come into Monkey Mia and assessed what was going on with Holeyfin and Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin. Perhaps they had realized that they would need help in order to steal Holeyfin, so they had gone out to find their third member, Cetus. They had been spending a considerable amount of time with Realnotch and Hi lately, and they had apparently recruited their help as well. With all that support, they had launched their attack. The chase had gone on for quite a while, occasionally breaking down into bouts of fighting, hitting, ramming, and then more chasing. Although it had been hard to keep track of all that had transpired, one thing was clear: At the end of it, Holeyfin was now with Trips, Bite, and Cetus.
Realnotch and Hi had joined up with Trips, Bite, and Cetus to help them abscond with Holeyfin, even though they were already preoccupied with herding Munch (who remained with them throughout all of this). Once Holeyfin was secured with Trips, Bite, and Cetus, the two alliances had parted company, but not too far away, apparently remaining within calling distance. For the first time, we were beginning to understand why alliances formed special bonds with other alliances (what we referred to as second-order alliances). Two alliances working together could overpower a third alliance and steal a female from them or put up a solid defense against attempts from other alliances to interfere with their herding.
Cooperation between alliances added a significant level of complexity to the political world of male dolphins. Males had to sort out relationships not only within their alliances, but also with the members of the other alliance with whom they cooperated in a second-order relationship. This multilevel cooperation in dolphins was perhaps the most important discovery our research team would make. Cooperation among male mammals even on an occasional basis is rare enough, and alliance formation, where males form long-term cooperative bonds, is even rarer. But nothing as complex as long-term alliances among pairs and triplets forming long-term alliances with other pairs and triplets has been found in any other mammal besides dolphins and humans.
Among humans living in hunter-gatherer societies, for example, two brothers living in a village may share resources and help each other out. In turn, they may also develop cooperative relationships with a few other small groups within their village. All of these men may cooperate at times to defend their shared village. Several villages may sometimes band together as a united front against other similar bands of villages or neighboring tribes, and so on. Carried to an extreme in modern society, layer upon layer of cooperating bodies has resulted in massive institutions such as nation-states.
A group of males we referred to as the “wow crowd” later showed us that we had not yet exhausted the possibilities for complexity in male dolphin relationships. Numbering about fourteen, the Wow Crowd didn’t fit the alliance formation pattern we had become accustomed to. Whenever we encountered them, the Wow Crowd males were all together. Pairings within the huge group were obvious, but they changed from one encounter to another. There were no stable pairs or triplets and no clear second-order alliances. Richard decided to try to sort out what was going on. After several field seasons devoted to watching them, he decided that the Wow Crowd constituted a “superalliance.” They cooperated with one another, as did alliances and second-order alliances, but pairings within the superalliance were unstable.
Amazed as we were by the discovery of alliances and then by the discovery of alliances cooperating with other alliances, we had not yet (and perhaps still have not) learned all there is to know about the diversity of ways in which Shark Bay males cooperate.
After losing Holeyfin, Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin hung back, agitated and apparently defeated. Andrew and I jumped into our boat now as well. We would follow Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin, while Richard stayed with Trips, Bite, Cetus, and Holeyfin. When we caught up to them, Bibi and Sicklefin were petting each other furiously. It was as though they needed to reassure each other after such a defeat. The analogy with human behavior was downright comical, and we couldn’t resist anthropomorphizing, putting words into their mouths: “Yeah, we put up a good fight, we’re still the toughest … we’ll get Holeyfin back from those lousy thugs, yaa: you’re okay, Sicklefin, yaa, you’re okay, Bibi. yaa … yaa …” If they were human, they would have been clapping each other’s shoulders. The three were following along behind Trips, Bite, Cetus, and Holeyfin but keeping their distance. They came to the boat and rode at the bow, and I could see how excited and agitated they were by the quick tension of their movements.
Snubnose started to drift back behind the other two, and Bibi broke away from Sicklefin to go back to him. It seemed as though Sicklefin and Bibi were rallying the forces to pursue Trips, Bite, and Cetus, but Snubnose, in spite of his initial enthusiasm about Holeyfin, had little interest. Bibi seemed to be the most gung ho funny, given that he had been the least involved in courting Holeyfin back at Monkey Mia. With the little added encouragement from Bibi, however, Snubnose soon caught up, and the three of them began to surface synchronously, closing the distance between themselves and Trips, Bite, Cetus, and Holeyfin.
I could imagine them saying, “Ya, c’mon, let’s get ’em … c’mon, Snubnose, don’t be a chicken.” But when they got within about forty yards of the others, they seemed to lose their nerve. They slowed, fell out of synchrony, and milled around nervously, and once again Snubnose drifted back behind them. Sicklefin and Bibi took to petting each other furiously again. “Looks like they’ve lost their nerve. Especially Snubnose. They don’t really want to mess with Trips, Bite, and Cetus anymore,” I reported to Richard over the radio.
Twice more, Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin seemed to rally up the gumption to go after Trips, Bite, and Cetus, then lost their nerve when they got close. Finally Snubnose did a tail-out dive, heading away from the other two males. He had apparently made a decision. He preferred foraging to fighting. All three turned back toward Monkey Mia. Their spirits seemed to lift as they approached the shallows. A horde of tourists eagerly awaited the arrival of dolphins with buckets of fish. The males sped up as they approached and then parked themselves in the shallows, bellies to the sand, bracing with their pectoral fins, heads uplifted, mouths agape, as they were enthusiastically stuffed by their human admirers.
I couldn’t help being struck by the disjunction between what people assumed about these dolphins and the reality of their lives. One lady kept referring to Bibi as “she,” as in “Isn’t she sweet!” To me, Bibi was probably the dolphin to whom that adjective was least applicable, and certainly the battle he had just fought was hardly “sweet.” “She has such gentle eyes.” To me they looked wild and mischievous, slightly bloodshot … unpredictable. This woman also got it into her mind that Sicklefin was Bibi’s baby, though Sicklefin was at least as large as, if not larger than, Bibi. Perhaps she had heard that there was a mother and baby (Holeyfin and Holly) and then assumed that she must be seeing a mother and baby.
In any case, she kept telling Sicklefin he was a “gorgeous little imp.” When Sicklefin snapped at her dangling hand, she laughed and told him he was being “awfully cheeky.” Same planet, very different realities, I thought. Good thing these tough-guy dolphins don’t understand what you’re saying, lady!
After the feeding, Bibi and Sicklefin still seemed to be hanging tight together, with Snubnose on the outs. All three males moved off into deeper water, Bibi with his pectoral fin rested against Sicklefin’s side. Snubnose joined, placing his pectoral fin against Bibi’s side, but Bibi turned away from Snubnose and started rubbing his body along Sicklefin’s pectoral fin, breaking contact with Snubnose. Snubnose drifted apart. All three snagged at the surface.
A moment later Snubnose broke rank, lunged forward, circled around, approached Bibi and Sicklefin head-on, and pushed his way in between them, almost as though he were trying to break up the cozy camaraderie that excluded him. He rubbed his body along Bibi’s pectoral fin. Bibi remained snagging, aloof, pressed close to Sicklefin.
Eventually all three males settled into a long bout of snagging, oriented out to the north. Perhaps they were tired after the morning’s excitement and a belly full of fish. Perhaps they were listening to the sounds of dolphins in the distance. They began to travel out that way. Bibi petted with Snubnose briefly, then quickly rejoined Sicklefin, surfacing in perfect synchrony with him, while Snubnose remained a bit apart and out of step. I felt a bit sorry for Snubnose.
Bibi and Sicklefin, riding just in front of the bow of the boat, tilted on their sides, bellies toward each other, both twitching their heads in funny, jerky little motions. They did this several times, then approached each other rapidly, tilting, then butting their shoulders together, rolling so that the point of contact moved down from shoulders to tail stock. As they pulled apart, both males flicked their tails up and down in a fast, tense, exaggerated little flailing motion. They repeated this strange ritual several more times, slamming shoulders, rolling their sides together, then flailing their tails as they separated again. They reminded me of football players head butting after a good play. Yet another bizarre, ritualized display, this time clearly directed to one another rather than to any female. Perhaps some sort of “war dance” intended to develop solidarity and rile up the forces.
Sicklefin and Bibi, more and more excited by their little “dance,” sped up, traveling faster and faster until they were leaping out to the north, Snubnose trailing behind. We followed along, gradually realizing that there was a fourth dolphin now, and they were chasing it. All three males porpoised in synchrony behind the new dolphin. The chase didn’t last long, and when we caught up, we discovered the new focus of their attentions: Poindexter, a female.
As we caught up to them, Sicklefin and Bibi were displaying together on either side of her, arching their backs and bobbing their chins up and down, then slapping their tails and diving underneath her. A moment later Poindexter was belly up underneath Bibi, apparently rubbing her belly vigorously against his. Were they mating? We couldn’t be sure.
When Poindexter started rubbing and petting with Sicklefin, Bibi briefly approached and petted with Snubnose. Poindexter then rubbed underneath both Bibi and Sicklefin, just as Holeyfin and Puck had done earlier with Sicklefin. They snagged side by side, touching each other’s pectoral fins, seeming to pretty much ignore Poindexter.
As was so often the case, it was hard to tell how much all of this had to do with Poindexter and how much had to do with the relationships among the males. The males behaved as though they were compelled to prove themselves somehow after having been defeated by Trips, Bite, and Cetus. Herding Poindexter was their solution. Since they had lost Holeyfin a couple of hours earlier, they had been almost continuously displaying to each other and petting. Andrew and I, once again unable to resist the opportunity to anthropomorphize a bit, chuckled over the parallels between the behavior of these dolphins and that of a gang of nineteen-year-old human males, vying for status, showing off, challenging each other’s manhood, reinforcing egos, driven to greater and greater displays of silliness.
Shortly, the males and Poindexter began traveling back south toward Monkey Mia. We were at least a mile and a half from Monkey Mia, and the tide was low. They would have to skirt around the edge of the shallow weed bank to stay in deep enough water. As they traveled, all of the dolphins dove down to the bottom and rubbed their bodies against the “trees” of seagrass that stood up from the bottom. Sicklefin sensuously rubbed his side along a seaweed tree, then hooked it with his tail, dislodging it from the bottom and trailing it along for a while before letting it go with a twitch to drift off behind him.
Sicklefin and Bibi continued to pet each other occasionally, sometimes even as Poindexter was rubbing both of them. At one point she went upside down underneath Sicklefin and rolled her entire body to and fro so dramatically that the entire width of her belly and sides swept back and forth against his pectoral fin. He simply held his pectoral fin in position while she did all the work. Again I had to wonder, Was this an indication of her genuine enthusiasm about Sicklefin or was she just trying to appease him somehow? Meanwhile Snubnose followed along behind, occasionally coming to ride the bow of our boat—cheap substitute for dolphin companionship.
The males brought Poindexter back to Monkey Mia. On the whole, and certainly compared with the way they had behaved with Holeyfin earlier in the day, they were disinterested in Poindexter. No displays, no following her every move, no surfacing in synchrony right behind her, no genital inspections. Were they just worn out from their exciting morning or was Poindexter just less desirable to them, and if so, why? Later in the day, Poindexter took off, and the males didn’t even bother to pursue her. Over the next few days and weeks, Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin often herded Poindexter, but we had the distinct impression that they were halfhearted. Poindexter seemed to be the fallback female.
What seemed most astonishing about the chain of events on August 19 was the way that Trips and Bite came into Monkey Mia in the morning and assessed the situation, then, in a way that suggested considerable forethought and premeditation, went out to recruit their third partner, Cetus, and their second-order alliance partners, Realnotch and Hi. What had gone through their minds as they watched Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin courting Holeyfin that morning? Had they been scheming an attack? What and how had they communicated their plan to Cetus and to Realnotch and Hi?
Every day we observed fascinating new twists that shed further light on the emerging picture of male alliance politics and raised more and more questions. Why did so many alliances consist of threesomes? In a simple and ideal world, a male dolphin would do his own thing and avoid having to share mating opportunities at all. Sharing those opportunities with another male would be costly indeed, but perhaps he couldn’t achieve any mating opportunities at all without some help. But splitting them three ways? This was terribly costly and puzzling given that the odd-man-out phenomenon suggested that two was a better number anyway.
We reasoned that considering the slow reproductive rate of female dolphins (one baby every four years, at best), only very few females are cycling at any one time. So fertile females are at a premium. Because of this, males must compete intensely for rare opportunities to mate and sire offspring. Such competition for mating opportunities is well documented in many animal species and is responsible for the fact that males in so many species fight viciously and evolve features like huge canine teeth and large size that enhance their fighting ability.
Perhaps the most extreme example is the elephant seal. Male elephant seals are huge, weighing several times as much as females and sporting fearsome canines. Males are so much larger than females that females are sometimes injured during mating. During the mating season, females haul out onto select beaches in large numbers. Males compete with one another viciously. Only one male will win, and he will win the entire harem of females, siring tens of pups during that season. The losing males will sire none (or close to it). With odds like that, competition is brutal.
Among dolphins, a lone male would be hard-pressed to mate with an unwilling female. All she has to do is be passive, and a male pushing up against her will succeed only in causing her to drift away from him. The only way he could force himself upon her would be to pin her against something. Among right whales, mating involves several males and a female. The female, surrounded by eager males, finds herself in the position where, as she rolls away to evade one suitor, she rolls toward another. Though the males aren’t actually cooperating, the fact is that the female is pinned among them, and none would succeed in mating without the presence of the others.
Male dolphins may have started out in a similar situation. More than one male was needed in order for any one male to mate successfully with a less-than-willing female. This could have set the stage for cooperation. Two males working together had the tremendous advantage of being able to repel other males. Even though each member of the pair halved the chances that he would sire offspring with a female, the odds may still have been better than in a free-for-all, with many other males involved.
Of course, once a cooperating pair of males succeeds in outcompeting single males, others will be better off forming pairs as well. Pairs become the norm, and the advantage of pair formation is lessened. But what if one pair now adds a third cooperating member? The triplet now has the advantage of numbers, and their opponents will now be forced to take on third partners, so triplet alliances become the norm. Now, if one alliance forms a second-order partnership with another alliance, they have in effect doubled their numbers and forced their opponents to do the same. Evolutionary biologists refer to such escalations as an “arms race.” I suppose we should thank the gods that male dolphins do not have the means to construct nuclear weapons.
Virtually every male dolphin in our study population belonged to an alliance. The only exceptions we saw involved males whose alliance partners died. Belonging to an alliance is the raison d’être for male dolphins in Shark Bay, and they get started early in life. Cookie, Smoky, and Jesse, for example, are three young males, all born within a few years of one another. They have spent quite a lot of time together since infancy, perhaps simply because their mothers share similar ranges, bringing them into regular contact. They roughhouse and cavort around as young mammals tend to do, while their mothers forage nearby. Since dolphins are so long-lived, it will be many years before we will know for sure whether they will grow up to be alliance partners, but I bet they will.
Although many of the alliance partnerships that existed when we started watching the Shark Bay dolphins in 1982 (we photographed them together that year) are still in place all these years later, not all have remained so stable over the long term. Several of the alliances that taught us about male behavior during the late 1980s have disappeared. When we first began working in Shark Bay, three alliances seemed to dominate Red Cliff Bay: Trips, Bite, and Cetus; Chop, Bottomhook, and Lamda; and Realnotch, Hi, Hack, and Patches. Over the years, Hack and Patches disappeared, leaving Realnotch and Hi to carry on. Trips, Bite, and Cetus all disappeared; and Chop and Lamda disappeared, leaving Bottomhook (who later joined Realnotch and Hi).
We have no idea what happened to all those males who disappeared. Perhaps they all died of natural causes, and then again, maybe not. A few times we have wondered if males might sometimes fight to the death or perhaps force other males to seek residence somewhere else.
The disappearance of Patches, a former member of the Realnotch, Hi, Hack, and Patches foursome (probably a second-order alliance of the two pairs: Realnotch with Hi and Hack with Patches), was particularly suspicious. One day we watched as Patches’s partners, along with the alliance Trips, Bite, and Cetus, ganged up on him ferociously. When we first encountered the group, Hi was sidled up alongside of Patches with an erect penis, apparently a dominance display not unlike those performed by dogs. There was a lot of jostling and commotion, when suddenly a clear alignment formed out of the chaos. All six males lined up face-on against Patches. After a tense and foreboding moment, they charged at him, and we caught a glimpse of one dolphin biting at him and another striking with its tail flukes. A chase ensued, and when we caught up, the six had lined up against Patches once again and attacked him a second time. Afterward Patches lay on the water’s surface, neck arched, holding his head upward in a stiff and awkward-looking position, the whites of his eyes showing, emitting a shrill, squealing sound. He was scared and in pain. The following day we came across Realnotch, Hack, Hi, and Patches together once again, and all had fresh new wounds: a gash over Realnotch’s eye, a new piece out of Patches’s dorsal fin.
This event may well have been one of a series that eventually led to the dissolution of the second-order partnership between Realnotch-Hi and Hack-Patches and perhaps also the dissolution of the Hack-Patches alliance. A month or so after the attack on Patches, Hack disappeared, and not too long thereafter, during the hiatus between field seasons, Patches also disappeared for good. We never saw either again and were left to wonder about their fates.
It is impossible to know why Patches was ostracized so severely by his alliance partners, assisted by Chop, Bottomhook, and Lamda, but his attempts to forge bonds with Trips, Bite, and Cetus might have had something to do with it. Just beforehand, we had encountered Patches traveling with Trips, Bite, and Cetus one afternoon, far from his alliance partners. This seemed mildly unusual at the time. After the attack, we again found him without his alliance partners, in the company of Trips, Bite, and Cetus. Whether cause or effect, Patches was clearly currying favor with them around that time.
For many, the story of male dolphins cooperating and competing among themselves to herd females, aggressively forcing the females to stay with them and mate, is difficult to accept. We first published a couple of scientific papers on male cooperation and herding in scientific journals. Then, perhaps because it was so different from expectations or because such “politically incorrect” behavior on the part of intelligent males held such a horrid fascination, the popular press picked up on the story. Richard, as lead researcher on this topic, was inundated by requests for articles, filming dates, and interviews. The New York Times ran a long article entitled “Dolphin Courtship: Brutal, Cunning and Complex,” and a PBS Nova documentary was produced called The Private Lives of Dolphins.
People found it difficult to swallow the notion that dolphins, supposedly the kind, smiling, gentle denizens of peaceful seas, could possibly be so rude and calculating. Elizabeth Gawain, the gentle soul who first told us about Monkey Mia, was one person who reacted with horror to our first reports on male alliances herding females. When she visited us in Australia in 1988, Snubnose, Bibi, and Sicklefin were in full swing, herding females in the shallows at Monkey Mia on a daily basis. She watched and listened to our interpretations of their behavior and questioned everything thoroughly, always seeking alternative and “nicer” explanations for the behavior of the males. But after watching Bibi and Sicklefin viciously attack a female they were herding one afternoon, she broke down in tears and told me that, much as she hated to admit it, she felt that we were right.
Elizabeth had the bigness of heart, mind, and soul to see the dolphins for herself and to do so open-mindedly. Ultimately she was able to accept what was eminently obvious. Others were far more resistant. One man wrote a master’s thesis, “deconstructing” our research results and claiming that we were simply projecting our own personalities onto the dolphins, implying that other folks with better dispositions might have discovered the dolphins to be the kind and gentle, perpetually sweet creatures they are supposed to be.
More recently, dolphins (not in Shark Bay) have been observed to kill harbor porpoises, apparently for no reason, and male dolphins have been seen committing infanticide. When news of these nasty behaviors hit the press, The New York Times published an article entitled “Evidence Puts Dolphins in New Light, as Killers” subtitled “Smiling Mammals Possess Unexplained Darker Side.” As with our earlier observations of male dolphins herding females to monopolize mating opportunities, the “dark side” of dolphin behavior always seems to come as a shock.
Personally, the discoveries we made about the behavior of male dolphins have enhanced rather than diminished my respect for them. They are more like us, and we are more like them, than some may want to admit. Their behavior is wondrous and surprising in its complexity, depth, and subtlety. They are not the perpetually sweet and kind creatures we at first imagined them to be. Dolphins can indeed be kind and sweet and gentle, but they can also be nasty and selfish and downright “politically incorrect” by our standards. Like us, they are complex and multifaceted.