Remember the 2000s? When you would throw on your vertically striped button down shirt and head to the bar to try and pick up chicks?
That was great. This song was playing and you totally were gonna score. Totally. Man, that was the life. The 2010s suck in comparison to the 2000s.
But, it turns out, dolphins haven’t left the 2000s behind (genius beings those dolphins). They’ve never left the 2000s. Because when they go out to get laid, they act just like Bros after some kamikazes at the bar. From NPR:
[Male dolphin alliances in Shark Bay: changing perspectives in a 30-year study], written by Ricpaper, written by Richard C. Connor and Michael Krutzen, explains that male dolphins form cognitively complex alliances with each other that may last as long as 20 years.
BROS! Dolphins have Bros!
Connor and Krutzen — who have formed a new organization called The Dolphin Alliance Project — focus on the males, because only the males carry out alliances. They write that in 1987, early in their long-term studies:
“We discovered that males in pairs and trios cooperate to sequester and control the movement of (‘herd’) single oestrous females for periods lasting from less than 1 hour to several weeks.”
In that same year, they observed cooperation among two pairs or trios of males, who together attacked competing alliances and stole away the females these rivals were herding. Conner and Krutzen term the pairs and trios “first-order alliances” and the larger cooperative associations of combined pairs and trios as “second-order alliances.”
This is like a Chappelle sketch come to animal life. It really sounds almost exactly like you and your boys at a bar, trying to hunt for chicks.
The male alliances themselves are evidently complicated in nature because the males have to track not only what the female is doing, and what their immediate alliance partners are doing, but also what other pairs and trios in the water may be doing.
Can’t let those other dolphin bros game your girl, that’s for sure.
Maybe The Simpsons was right. Maybe dolphins did once run the world.
[H/T @EricGeller]