This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

It's great to have friends, especially if you're an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin.

Because new research shows that the males who were the most popular with the lads are

also the most successful with the ladies.

Just describe how these affable marine mammals maintain and leverage their complex social

connections in a pair of papers in the journal Current Biology.

Male dolphins form lifelong cooperative relationships.

Stephanie King of the University of Bristol.

She's been studying the dolphin population that inhabits Shark Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage

site off the coast of Western Australia.

By studying populations like the Shark Bay dolphins for many years, we start to see the complex

ways that they maintain their important social relationships.

These connections are more than just casual acquaintances, they're crucial for the dolphins

to be able to fend off rivals and secure mates.

When navigating their social world, it is those males that are more adept at building

strong friendships that are ultimately more successful.

So what do these aquatic alliances look like?

In Shark Bay, every male dolphin is embedded in a social network consisting of four to

14 males.

Leave you a Gerber of the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

These four to 14 males are also known as second-order alliances and they are the core social

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