Dolphin social phenotypes vary in response to food availability but not the North Atlantic Oscillation index

Abstract

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 our ability to predict population-level response to environmental change. Here we show that bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) show a high degree of individual variability in responses to variation in proxies of food availability and climate, against a background of population-level stability. Individual dolphins did not consistently respond to yearly variation in environmental factors. However, at the monthly scale individuals became better connected to their local social environment in months of high salmon abundance, but their overall gregariousness and connectedness to the wider network did not change. This stability in social network position suggests there are important drivers maintaining a consistent structure. These results indicate that forecasting population responses to environmental change should account for among-individual variation in mean and plasticity of social behaviour.

Dolphin social phenotypes vary in response to food availability but not the North Atlantic Oscillation index

“…We did this for all trait-environmental variabletimescale combinations (12 in total), even when there was no evidence for random slopes, to aid comparison among traits. Data and R code are available online [76].…”