Revealed: How playful whales and dolphins socialise with each other
The Australian research looking at images and video from 17 locations around the world challenges previous scientific assumptions that dolphins 'harassed' whales, finding instead that the play was often mutual.
Griffith University whales and climate program lead Dr Olaf Meynecke and co-author Olivia Crawley analysed nearly 200 separate and unrelated interactions between 425 baleen whales and 1570 dolphins. Their findings were published in the journal, Discover Animals, on Tuesday.
'When we go out and do our whale surveys or tagging whales, we always joke that we can find the whales by looking for the dolphins,' Meynecke said. 'Whales that show a lot of active behaviours seem to get the most interest from the dolphins.'
Meynecke said the dolphins, being faster swimmers, usually initiated the encounters, but the whales responded either positively or neutrally most of the time. Across all whale species, at least a quarter of the interactions were mutual, and for humpback whales it was at least a third. It was rare that the whale would try to avoid the dolphin or become aggressive.
Most of the documented interactions were between adult animals, but a whale calf was present in 44 events and a dolphin calf in 53 events. Both whale and dolphin calves were present on 21 occasions.
There were six different whale species in the dataset – more than two-thirds were humpbacks, followed by grey whales (16 per cent) and fin whales (7 per cent). More than half the dolphins were bottlenose, followed by common dolphins (17 per cent) and Pacific wide-sided dolphins (15 per cent).
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