Humans impact marine mammals both directly (through provisioning, boat interactions, etc) and indirectly (through our influence on climate change and associated environmental disturbances), and these are also not mutually exclusive.  Bottlenose dolphins as a species have good behavioral plasticity - meaning they can adapt and change their behaviors to fit the environment they are in.  This means they are better off than other species that are more specialized in their niche when environmental disturbances (which are ever increasing due to climate change) occur.  But at the individual level this may not be the case for every dolphin in a population.  Some choose a more specialized foraging strategy, which could become a problem if that resource is heavily impacted by a disturbance.  The effects of this can be exacerbated when there is direct human interaction like provisioning, as these dolphins have other stressors and changes to their behavior. Join us as we look at the interplay between human influence and forage specialization on the lives of individual bottlenose dolphins from a long-term (37 years) research group in Monkey Mia, Australia.

Paper freely available: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.617550/full

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