The role of touch in marine mammal society: a review and future directions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While social living has many advantages, it also has significant challenges associated with differences in individual needs and abilities. Individuals in social species communicate across sensory modalities to mediate their relationships. Affiliative touch, defined here as nonaggressive physical contact between conspecifics, plays a well-documented role in establishing, affirming and repairing social bonds and facilitating cooperation in some terrestrial taxa. However, the degree to which touch is involved in affiliative behaviours in nonterrestrial species is poorly understood. Marine mammals represent a valuable opportunity for deepening our understanding of the behavioural mechanisms that enable social living through a comparative approach, as they have unique adaptations to different levels of aquatic life and environments and display diverse social structures. Here, we reviewed current trends in research on social touch in marine mammals and evaluated existing evidence for its affiliative functions. Overall, touch was involved in mediating a range of relations, from short interactions with ‘strangers’ to repeated interactions with lifelong associates. We found that the prevalence of tactile interactions outside the mother–infant relationship was generally associated with a species' social structure. But, because of the logistical challenges associated with observing touch in species that spend most of their lives underwater, only a few odontocete species and captive populations dominate the existing literature focused on touch and social interactions. We suggest that leveraging emerging technologies (e.g. uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), animal-borne cameras and thermal cameras), alongside long-term monitoring and study designs that ensure comparability, can expand and deepen our understanding of how animals mediate their social relationships. • Touch is involved in mediating social relationships across terrestrial species. • We review the knowledge and gaps on the social role of touch in marine mammals. • Touch mediates a range of relations and is often associated with social structure. • However, most studies have focused on only a few species or captive populations. • New technologies allow us to study social touch in previously hard-to-access taxa.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".