The biogeography of group sizes in humpback dolphins (Sousa spp.)

Mingming Liu; Mingli Lin; David Lusseau; Songhai Li

doi:10.1111/1749-4877.12542

The biogeography of group sizes in humpback dolphins (Sousa spp.)

Mingming Liu, Mingli Lin, David Lusseau, Songhai Li^* (Corresponding Author)

^*Corresponding author for this work

Aberdeen Centre For Environmental Sustainability

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

13 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Humpback dolphins (Sousa spp.) are obligate shallow‐water and resident species, and they typically live in fission–fusion societies composed of small‐sized groups with changeable membership. However, we have scant knowledge of their behavioral ecology, starting with potential factors influencing inter‐population variability of their group sizes. Here, we compiled a new global dataset of humpback dolphin group sizes based on 150 published records. Our data indicated an inter‐specific consistency of group‐living strategy among the 4 species in the Sousa genus, as these species preferred living in small‐sized groups with a mean size of mostly no more than 10, a minimum size of single individual or small pairs, and a maximum size of several tens or ≈100. In addition, we clearly showed the geographic variations in group sizes of humpback dolphins at a global scale. We found that the geographic variations in humpback dolphin group sizes were primarily associated with the latitude, sea surface temperature, and abundance. To conclude, our findings provide insights into social dynamics and socioecological trade‐offs of humpback dolphins, and help better understand how these resident animals adapted to their shallow‐water habitats from the perspectives of biogeography and socioecology

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	527-537
Number of pages	11
Journal	Integrative zoology
Volume	16
Issue number	4
Early online date	8 Apr 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/1749-4877.12542
Publication status	Published - 1 Jul 2021

Bibliographical note

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to the organizations and people that have made contributions to scientific research on humpback dolphins. This study was financially supported by the Major Science and Technology Project in Hainan province (ZDKJ2016009‐1‐1), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41306169, 41406182, and 41422604), the Ocean Park Conservation Foundation of Hong Kong (AW02‐1920), the Chinese White Dolphin Conservation Action Project of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural of People's Republic of China (Y760091HT1), and the Biodiversity Investigation, Observation and Assessment Program of Ministry of Ecology and Environment of China (2019–2023). The writing of this paper was supported in part by the China‐UK Newton Fund PhD Placement from British Council and China Scholarship Council.

Keywords

socioecology
humpback dolphins
social dynamics
biogeography
geographic variations
group size
habitat

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10.1111/1749-4877.12542Licence: CC BY-NC

Liu_et_al_Biogeography_group_Integrative_zoology_vor
© 2021 The Authors. Integrative Zoology published by International Society of Zoological Sciences, Institute of Zoology/Chinese Academy of Sciences and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Final published version, 1.17 MBLicence: CC BY-NC

Cite this

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The biogeography of group sizes in humpback dolphins (Sousa spp.)

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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