After over a decade of observing the behaviours of wild humpback dolphins, a group of Australian scientists have made a ground-breaking new discovery - dolphin’s use wingmen! It turns out that humans aren’t the only ones who sometimes need a helping hand when they’re out on the pull, apparently dolphins do too.
Researchers from the University of Zurich, Western Australia and Murdoch witnessed male humpback dolphins plunging deep into the water and all the way down to the sea floor just to dig up old sea sponges, supposedly to give to their lady dolphin crush. The male humpbacks would often have to skilfully balance their spongey courting gift on the tip of their beak whilst swimming back up to the surface – a pretty impressive feat for a creature with no thumbs.
Interestingly the humpbacks only seemed to do this kind of heavy lifting whilst in the presence of sexually mature females, so it’s believed that the poor lads go through all this trouble as a way of proving that they’re boyfriend material.
It’s the first time this sort of behaviour has been witnessed in this species as it tends to be extremely rare and unusual in most animals aside from us. However, similar patterns of behaviour have mainly been seen in birds like male, great bowerbirds who throw colourful objects into the air to clear room for their ‘mating arena’, black wheatears and palm cockatoos who beat twigs and leaves against trees as a show of their masculinity.
But perhaps the most surprising discovery of all is the fact that male humpback dolphins sometimes even work together to find sponges and other objects to gift to their potential mates.
This incredible display of wingmen, I mean… fin-men in nature even surprised marine biologist and study co-author Stephanie King, from the University of Western Australia who said
'The formation of alliances between adult males for the purposes of coercing females is very uncommon, since mating success cannot be shared.'
Normally in nature, rival males fight and often even kill each other trying to get the girl. So you can probably imagine the shock when scientists saw pairs of male humpbacks working together, using sound and gesture in order to attract just one mate between them.
Dolphins are some of the most intelligent and socially complex animals on the planet so these new findings could prove invaluable to uncovering even more about these fascinating and beautiful marine mammals.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.