Dolphin Bling Gets Girls
Just as men can use fast cars or showy clothes to impress the ladies, so too do male Amazon river dolphins show off stuff to woo the opposite sex.
Among these dolphins, the attention-getter is a male carrying a branch or similar flotsam in its mouth. Such "player" behavior is a first to be documented in aquatic mammals and, among land mammals, it has previously been seen only in chimpanzees and humans, researchers said.
These new findings help show that humans are "not as different from other animals as some might like to think," said researcher Anthony Martin, a behavioral ecologist and population biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Amazon river dolphins, also known as botos or pink river dolphins (Inia geoffrensis), live mostly off fish in the Amazon River basin, with the occasional turtle or crab...
