Abstract
In recent decades, a number of studies have examined whether various non-human animals understand their partner's role in cooperative situations. Yet the relatively tolerant timing requirements of these tasks make it theoretically possible for animals to succeed by using simple behavioural strategies rather than by jointly intended coordination. Here we investigated whether bottlenose dolphins could understand a cooperative partner's role by testing whether they could learn a button-pressing task requiring precise behavioural synchronization. Specifically, members of cooperative dyads were required to swim across a lagoon and each press their own underwater button simultaneously (within a 1 s time window), whether sent together or with a delay between partners of 1–20 s. We found that dolphins were able to work together with extreme precision even when they had to wait for their partner, and that their coordination improved over the course of the study, with the time between button presses in the latter trials averaging 370 ms. These findings show that bottlenose dolphins can learn to understand their partner's role in a cooperative situation, and suggest that the behavioural synchronization evident in wild dolphins' synchronous movement and coordinated alliance displays may be a generalized cognitive ability that can also be used to solve novel cooperative tasks.
Highlights
Cooperation is found across the animal kingdom, from humans [1] to fishes [2] to baboons [3] to dolphins [4]
The proportion of first button presses by the target animal significantly decreased over the course of the trials, as did the time between button presses, indicating that individuals became better at coordinating their behaviour
During earlier trials, delayed individuals swam significantly faster, and the time between partners’ button presses was significantly longer, suggesting that initial strategies focused on the delayed animal catching up to its partner rather than the target animal waiting and the partners precisely coordinating their behaviour
Summary
Cooperation is found across the animal kingdom, from humans [1] to fishes [2] to baboons [3] to dolphins [4]. It may be that the fishermen act as an effective barrier, much like other barriers that dolphins herd fish against [16,17]. Successful cooperation such as this does not necessarily require an understanding of the cooperative role that others are playing [18]. To examine this question of understanding, experimental evidence is required
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