Anthropogenic noise impairs cooperation in bottlenose dolphins

Understanding the impact of human disturbance on wildlife populations is of societal importance, with anthropogenic noise known to impact a range of taxa, including mammals, birds, fish, and invertebrates. While animals are known to use acoustic and other behavioural mechanisms to compensate for increasing noise at the individual level, our understanding of how noise impacts social animals working together remains limited. Here, we investigated the effect of noise on coordination between two bottlenose dolphins performing a cooperative task. We previously demonstrated that the dolphin dyad can use whistles to coordinate their behaviour, working together with extreme precision. By equipping each dolphin with a sound-and-movement recording tag (DTAG-3) and exposing them to increasing levels of anthropogenic noise, we show that both dolphins nearly doubled their whistle durations and increased whistle amplitude in response to increasing noise. While these acoustic compensatory mechanisms a..., , Data files can be accessed using R studio.