The Dolphin Pod The Dolphin Pod

An interview with DCP Research Associate Manon Themelin and DCP Director Dr. Kathleen Dudzinski.  We learn how Manon got started researching dolphins and the exciting discoveries she's made. Manon's research into relationship quality (RQ) shows that the methods we apply to the study of ravens and chimpanzees works just as well for dolphins, albeit with some minor tweaks to accommodate for dolphins' aquatic lifestyle and peculiar ways of socializing. Also, it turns out that the positions dolphin adopt when swimming next to each other and how they navigate each others' slipstreams can tell us a lot about the relationships between individual dolphins. 

Justin interviews Jason Bruck, Assistant Professor of Biology at Stephen F. Austin State University. Jason is the head of the Bruck Integrative Biology Lab where he and his students study dolphin behavior and cognition.

Dolphins are pretty strange when it comes to the way they treat strangers. Unlike most primates (including humans) two completely different social groups - including different species - are able to integrate their societies without any violence whatsoever. Find out how DCP researchers Kelly Melillo-Sweeting and Nicole Danaher-Garcia discovered that the spotted dolphins living around Bimini are able to live peacefully alongside bottlenose dolphins AND how these Bimini spotted welcomed a group of four dozen "refugee" spotted dolphins into their society without batting an eye.

Kathleen and Kelly go on a Tinder date with Laura to learn about DCP’s history.

In this special podcast episode celebrating 20 years of the Dolphin Communication Project, Laura and Justin interview Kelly Melillo-Sweeting, Bimini Research Manager and all-around awesome scientist. Kel explains the findings form her recently published article on laterality in bottlenose dolphins – that is, a preference that dolphins seem to have for the right side of their bodies when hunting for prey in the sand. Just before dolphins stick their heads in the sand to grab hidden prey, they almost always twist to the left, maybe allowing them to use their right eye (i.e., their preferred eye) to give the ocean floor one last look before plunging their faces into it. Or maybe it’s because dolphin echolocation works best on the right side when it comes to searching for prey buried in the sand. Whatever the reason, the bottlenose dolphins off Bimini, The Bahamas are almost all (with one exception) left twisters when crater feeding.

Climate change poses a real threat to dolphin species across the globe. In this episode, we discuss a heatwave off the coast of Australia that appears to have killed a number of wild dolphins in Shark Bay.