Psychology Commons^™

Personality And Affiliation Involving A Cooperative Task In Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops Truncatus) Dyads, Kimberly Bagley

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Cooperation may be related to personality in bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) dyads. Five bottlenose dolphin pairs at the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS), Honduras, were presented with an apparatus released a food reward if opened cooperatively. I created personality profiles of each dolphin with traits grouped in two different contexts: dolphin-dolphin and dolphin-world. I hypothesized that success of the cooperative task would be related to similarities in socialization and dissimilar in interacting with objects. None of the dolphin pairs cooperated to open the apparatus. I then analyzed individual personalities in relation to the dolphins’ individual and mutual interactions with …