Female bottlenose dolphins appear to have a long memory when it comes to rough suitors—and they steer clear of them in the future, a new study suggests. Researchers watching Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in Australia's Shark Bay found that females use males' "signature whistles" like audio name tags, recalling which males were aggressive during prior mating seasons and avoiding them when they're fertile, reports Smithsonian Magazine.
"Females are using knowledge of individuals—that, to me, is super interesting," Laela Sayigh of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who was not involved with the study, tells National Geographic. "To my knowledge, this is the first time that there really has been a study of how these communication signals are used in mate choice." Researchers played recordings of 34 whistles from 11 known males to 17 females and tracked their movements by drone. Females that were able to get pregnant strongly avoided the calls of males with a history of coercive behavior—sometimes bolting away—while older females or those raising calves reacted far less.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest females draw on personal experience and a wider social memory of male aggression to manage the risks of "consortships," when a group of mate-seeking males converge on a lone female. The encounters can turn violent and last for days or weeks. The females, it seems, remember.
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