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Digital Publisher
Digital Commons at St. Mary's University
Publication Date
2025
Keywords
bottlenose dolphins; behaviors; evaluate; social compositions
Description
Well-being of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) has been measured in many ways, including activity levels. Activity levels are composed of behaviors that vary with intensity and range from floats, breaches, perimeter swims, and aerials. Deviations from baseline behavior or activity level may be indicative of changes in state of well-being. The purpose of this study was to assess the activity level of a large social grouping of bottlenose dolphins in human care during baseline observations. A total of 215 5-min observation sessions were collected for a population of 15 to 18 bottlenose dolphins located in Roatán, Honduras between 2019-2024. The findings indicated the lowest and highest levels of activity changed across years, which may have been related to social composition. Future research should evaluate the impact of different social compositions (e.g., presences or absences of males) on activity levels.
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1 page
City
San Antonio, Texas
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.