14 DAY TRIAL // As a man, if you want that thing, you have to spend money on expensive gifts, best wine, finest chocolate and flowers. But, if you enjoy those amazing acrobatic breaches executed by sea dolphins, you should know that many of them are made by males for some 15-20 seconds of underwater pleasure.
But the murky waters of the Amazon make the breaches useless, and boto or the Amazon River dolphin (Inia geoffroyensis) males find the rose offering variant more practical. In fact, it works. Only that what they give to their brides are weeds or twigs. Object-carrying behavior had been reported throughout the dolphin's areal in Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia, but a new research found that what seemed an innocent play appeared to be an unique sexual habit among mammals.
And this seems to be a cultural behavior, in other words, a non-instinctual sophisticated habit, which must be learned and it is passed inside the same population from generation to generation.
The team led by Tony Martin, of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK, and Vera da Silva, of the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Amazonas, Brazil, have investigated boto dolphins for 3 years in the Brazilian Amazon, but the researches pointed that this could be valid for more populations of the species, as the behavior had been observed in many isolated groups of boto dolphins, throughout South America.
The behavior was not instinctual, as many dolphin population did not display it. The "weeders" were the most prolific male breeders, real dolphin studs.
"I was struck by how many of the most frequent object-carriers were on the list of probable fathers of individual calves. It's so unusual that many of my colleagues were skeptical when I first suggested the idea, but now I think the evidence is overwhelming. Only humans and chimps do anything remotely similar, " Martin told NewScientist.
Dolphins are known to have a "culture", and their calls differ from population to population even inside the same species. In Australia, some bottlenose dolphins employ tools, like broken pieces of sponge around their noses in order to protects their snouts.
In mating rituals of many birds, the male has to offer a food item (like a fish in kingfishers, insect in the case of bee-eaters or fruit in the case of hornbills) or a nest building material item (stones in penguins), but offering flowers is unique. In mammals, chimps are known to offer food for sex: a recent research carried on in the Republic of Guinea (western Africa) showed that male chimps offered females papaya fruits, stolen from plantations, for sexual favors.
