Dolphins who team up with fishers gain more food and have an edge in survival, compared with those that hunt without bipedal partners.
People in Laguna proudly refer to their southern Brazilian city as the “national capital of fish-herding dolphins.” For at least 140 years, artisanal fishers and bottlenose dolphins have worked together in careful synchrony to catch mullet in a lagoon there. The spectacle of nets flying through the air while dolphins dive into the murky water has become a popular attraction for tourists and is recognized by local authorities as an intangible cultural heritage.
The resident population of up to 60 dolphins use their echolocation to find schools of mullet that humans otherwise would not be able to detect beneath the opaque water. Then the cetaceans herd the school toward the fishers, who are usually standing in the shallow water just offshore. The dolphins give a behavioral cue, such as a sudden deep dive, to let the fishers know when to cast their nets.
Many of these collaborations have disappeared, however. And those that remain are almost all in decline thanks to pollution, overfishing and habitat loss, combined with the general disconnection of humans from the natural environment. “Today most interactions we have with wildlife tend to be antagonistic and not mutually beneficial,” Cantor says. “So it’s really important to understand how these things happen and what we can do to safeguard this unique biological phenomenon.
These findings support “the long-standing hypothesis that these dolphins experience a higher prey capture rate when interacting with fishers,” says Jessica van der Wal, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who was not involved in the research. “I applaud the authors for their comprehensive and creative angles to better our understanding of the natural history of [this] complex cooperation.
Protecting dolphins from becoming bycatch would also help. The government could invest in more policing in the area to remove illegal nets and apprehend violators.
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