The male dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, are known to marine biologists for their messy social entanglements. Their relationships with each other are so unusual—they’re more like the intricate webs of the Mafia than the vertical hierarchies of chimpanzees—that, in a new paper, one team of scientists argues that the dolphins live in a social system that is unique among mammals. Intriguingly, the researchers also suggest that these complex, and often cooperative, relationships may stem in…
