Mauricio Cantor

Oregon State University | OSU · Department of Fisheries Wildlife

Culture is increasingly being understood as a driver of mammalian phenotypes. Defined as group-specific behaviour transmitted by social learning, culture is shaped by social structure. However, culture can itself affect social structure if individuals preferentially interact with others whose behaviour is similar, or cultural symbols are used to ma...

Multilevel societies, containing hierarchically nested social levels, are remarkable social structures whose origins are unclear. The social relationships of sperm whales are organized in a multilevel society with an upper level composed of clans of individuals communicating using similar patterns of clicks (codas). Using agent-based models informe...

Across animal societies, individuals invest time and energy in social interactions. The social landscape that emerges from these interactions can then generate barriers that limit the ability of individuals to disperse to, and reproduce in, groups or populations. Therefore, social barriers can contribute to the difference between the physical capac...

Multilevel societies (MLSs), stable nuclear social units within a larger collective encompassing multiple nested social levels, occur in several mammalian lineages. Their architectural complexity and size impose specific demands on their members requiring adaptive solutions in multiple domains. The functional significance of MLSs lies in their memb...

Interactions between humans and nature have profound consequences, which rarely are mutually beneficial. Further, behavioral and environmental changes can turn human-wildlife cooperative interactions into conflicts, threatening their continued existence. By tracking fine-scale behavioral interactions between artisanal fishers and wild dolphins targ...

Since 2015, Brazilian legislation governing resource extraction in the Santos Basin has required daily monitoring of beaches (∼1490 km) in Rio de Janeiro (RJ), São Paulo (SP), Paraná (PR), and Santa Catarina (SC) for fauna strandings. All stranded specimens are necropsied or rehabilitated. Here, we in vestig ate spatio-temporal variability among 51...

In contrast to many contemporary negative human‐nature relationships, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities have stewarded nature through cultural practices that include reciprocal contributions for both humans and nature. A rare example is the century‐old artisanal fishery in which net‐casting fishers and wild dolphins benefit by working togeth...

Research-implementation gaps pervade conservation practice. However, reconceptualising these gaps as productive learning spaces for stakeholder engagement can yield solutions. The first step in this process is to identify the stakeholders to engage in this research-implementation space and understand their relationships. An important research-imple...

Agrobiodiversity is economically, socially, culturally, and ecologically important for resilience of local communities and their agroecosystems. We identified an extreme flood impact on Alpha and Beta agrobiodiversity before, immediately after and two years after the largest flood ever recorded in three different floodplain types along the middle S...

Drones provide a privileged birds’-eye view for collecting high-resolution imagery for morphometric and behavioral sampling of animals. Biologically meaningful measurements extracted from overhead images require an accurate estimate of altitude, but current commercial drones include inaccurate barometer estimates. Recent proposals for coupling alti...

Sperm whales’ reproductive strategies are centered around their extreme sexual dimorphism, both in morphology and behavior. Females are much smaller than males and are highly social. Females live in stable, matrilineally based social units with communal care of calves, including cooperative defense and allonursing. In contrast, male sperm whales ar...

Aligning human interests and wildlife protection requires a deep understanding of human-wildlife interactions. Behavioral tracking and demographic surveys show that foraging synchrony is key to generate short- and long-term benefits for human fishers and wild dolphins. We used simulations to describe the conditions under which this cooperation can...

Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are cosmopolitan apex predators that occupy important ecological roles and show some variations in feeding and social habits in coastal and pelagic environments worldwide. Although they have been regularly reported along the Brazilian coastline, their natural history in these tropical and subtropical waters remains poor...

Elasmobranchs are highly diverse in movement, sensory capacity, and behavioural responses to the environment, leading to differences in the function and nature of associations and interactions between individuals, populations, and species. The term “aggregation” has been widely and variably used to describe co-occurrence across elasmobranch species...

Populations of many coastal cetaceans are threatened by negative anthropogenic impacts. Key precursors to effective recovery plans include understanding life histories and population parameters to establish baselines for subsequent changes. Here, we provide this information for one of the largest populations of Guiana dolphins (Sotalia guianensis),...

Located in the eastern tropical Pacific, the Galápagos Islands are an oceanic insular ecosystem subject to strong environmental variability driven by local and regional processes. Past research has shown that such conditions can attract and sustain at least 23 cetacean species, out of which 14 are common, including nine Delphinids, one Ziphiid, one...

Coastal areas are associated with anthropogenic activities and stressors that can expose the marine fauna to negative cumulative impacts. Apex predators, such as dolphins, can flag the quality of their environment through health parameters such as cutaneous and body conditions. We examined the potential relationship between environmental conditions...

Culture, a pillar of the remarkable ecological success of humans, is increasingly recognized as a powerful force structuring nonhuman animal populations. A key gap between these two types of culture is quantitative evidence of symbolic markers—seemingly arbitrary traits that function as reliable indicators of cultural group membership to conspecifi...

Human‐wildlife cooperation is a type of mutualism in which a human and a wild, free‐living animal actively coordinate their behaviour to achieve a common beneficial outcome. While other cooperative human‐animal interactions involving captive coercion or artificial selection (including domestication) have received extensive attention, we lack integr...

Human–wildlife cooperation occurs when humans and free-living wild animals actively coordinate their behavior to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome. These interactions provide important benefits to both the human and wildlife communities involved, have wider impacts on the local ecosystem, and represent a unique intersection of human and animal...

Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently...

Understanding the dynamics of small-scale fisheries requires considering the diversity of behaviours and skills of fishers. Fishers may have different abilities and tactics that can translate into different fishing outcomes. Here, we investigate variation in fishing behaviours among traditional net-casting fishers that are assisted by wild dolphins...

1. Human-wildlife cooperation is a type of mutualism in which a human and a wild, free-living animal actively coordinate their behaviour to achieve a common beneficial outcome. 2. While other cooperative human-animal interactions involving captive coer-cion or artificial selection (including domestication) have received extensive

Food provisioning promotes close interaction with wildlife but can negatively impact the targeted species. Repeated behavioural disruptions have the potential to negatively impact vital rates and have population level consequences. In Bunbury, Western Australia, food-provisioned female bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops aduncus, suffer reduced reproduct...

Social foraging decisions depend on individual payoffs. However, it is unclear how individual variation in phenotypic and behavioural traits can influence these payoffs, thereby the decisions to forage socially or individually. Here, we studied how individual traits influence foraging tactics of net-casting fishers who interact with wild dolphins....

Identifying individual animals is critical to describe demographic and behavioural patterns, and to investigate the ecological and evolutionary underpinnings of these patterns. The traditional non-invasive method of individual identification in mammals—comparison of photographed natural marks—has been improved by coupling other sampling methods, su...

By shaping where individuals move, habitat configuration can fundamentally structure animal populations. Yet, we currently lack a framework for generating quantitative predictions about the role of habitat configuration in modulating population outcomes. To address this gap, we propose a modelling framework inspired by studies using networks to cha...

Marine apex predators, such as coastal dolphins, are key components of ecosystem function and dynamics; understanding their spatial use therefore is important for conservation planning. Here, we describe spatial use of the threatened Guiana dolphin, Sotalia guianensis, within a mosaic of protected areas at their southern range in the Paranaguá estu...

Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently...

In 2014, a Resolution was approved by the IWC for establishing new, specific Terms of Reference to consolidate the Scientific Committee’s mandate on small cetaceans within its broader working program. This program opens the possibility of periodic reviews about the current knowledge and threats, as well as the possibility to implement Conservation...

The ability to build upon previous knowledge—cumulative cultural evolution—is a hallmark of human societies. While cumulative cultural evolution depends on the interaction between social systems, cognition and the environment, there is increasing evidence that cumulative cultural evolution is facilitated by larger and more structured societies. How...

The ability to build upon previous knowledge—cumulative cultural evolution (CCE)—is a hallmark of human societies. While CCE depends on the interaction between social systems, cognition and the environment, there is increasing evidence that CCE is facilitated by larger and more structured societies. However, the relative importance of social networ...

• Sperm whales have occupied the waters off the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador, for at least the past 200 years. During the 19th century, they were the target of intensive whaling that severely depleted the population. In recent times, after commercial whaling ended, sperm whales in the region remain vulnerable to multiple threats, especially potential...

The social decisions that individuals make—who to interact with and how frequently—give rise to social structure. The resulting social structure then determines how individuals interact with their surroundings—resources and risks, pathogens and predators, competitors and cooperators. However, despite intensive research on (a) how individuals make s...

Living in groups can benefit individuals in many ways, including in innovative problem solving. Several hypotheses have suggested mechanisms to explain why larger groups disproportionately outperform smaller groups, including the skill pool and pool of competence effects. However, disentangling these potential mechanisms from the effects of group s...

By shaping where individuals move, habitat configuration can fundamentally structure animal populations. Yet, we currently lack a framework for generating quantitative predictions about the role of habitat configuration in modulating population outcomes. For example, it is well known that the social structure of animal populations can shape spreadi...

Understanding the interplay between processes operating at large and small spatiotemporal scales in shaping biotic interactions remains challenging. Recent studies illustrate how phenotypic specialization, species life‐history traits and/or resource partitioning recurrently underlie the structure of mutualistic interactions in terrestrial ecosystem...

Social preferences in pigs have received little attention despite the welfare implication of providing an adequate social environment for farm animals. We investigated the extent to which domestic pigs show affiliative preferences in three behavioural contexts—rest, exploration, social nosing—and whether these preferences were influenced by sex, re...

Background: Human-animal interactions with mutual benefits in the wild are rare. Such positive interactions seem to require an intricate knowledge from the human side on the animals' behavior and their habitat. In southern Brazil, dolphins and human net-casting fishers have specialized in a cooperative foraging, in which fishers report being able...

Sea turtles are globally threatened due to short-and long-term exposure to anthropogenic activities. Many life-history traits make it difficult to study these species in the wild. Stranding events provide invaluable data to infer key aspects of sea turtle ecology, such as regional occurrence , health status, mortality rates, and potential threats....

Este é o primeiro relatório do Observatório COVID19 - Grupo: Redes de Contágio analisando os dados de óbitos da cidade de São Paulo. Neste relatório, integramos os dados de óbitos da cidade de São Paulo entre os dias 02/04/2020 e 28/04/2020 com informações sobre o fluxo de vítimas entre os hospitais e os cemitérios e crematórios da cidade de São Pa...

Este é o primeiro relatório do Observatório COVID19 - Grupo: Redes de Contágio – Laboratório de Estudos de Defesa para a região Sul do Brasil. Combinamos dados de casos confirmados do novo coronavírus (SARS-CoV-2) para o Sul, disponíveis até o dia 17/04/2020, com análises estruturais da rede de rotas rodoviárias intra e interestaduais para estimarm...

Este é o primeiro relatório do Observatório COVID1920 - Grupo: Redes de Contágio – Laboratório de Estudos de Defesa para a região Nordeste do Brasil. Combinamos dados de casos confirmados do novo coronavírus (SARS-CoV-2) para o Nordeste, conforme disponível até o dia 02/04, com análises estruturais da rede de rotas rodoviárias intra e interestaduai...

Structurally complex and competitive environments such as reef habitats may promote alternative behavioural feeding tactics in fishes. An understudied behavioural tactic is the follower-feeding association, in which individuals of a species follow (called “follower”) and benefit from the foraging activities of individuals of another species that di...

Among large variations in size, habitat use, trophic niche, and social systems of toothed whales, one species—the sperm whale—stands out as an animal of extremes. The world’s largest biological sonar operated by the largest brain on Earth shapes much of sperm whales’ lives as efficient predators, exploiting massive biological resources at great dep...

Cetaceans are fully aquatic predatory mammals that have successfully colonized virtually all marine habitats. Their adaptation to these habitats, so radically different from those of their terrestrial ancestors, can give us comparative insights into the evolution of female roles and kinship in mammalian societies. We provide a review of the diversi...

1.The social decisions that individuals make, in terms of where to move, who to interact with and how frequently, scale up to generate social structure. Such structure has profound consequences: individuals each have a unique social environment, social interactions can amplify or dampen individual differences at the population level, and population...

Individuals often associate socially with those who behave the sameway. This principle, homophily, could structure populations into distinct social groups. We tested this hypothesis in a bottlenose dolphin population that appeared to be clustered around a specialized foraging tactic involving cooperation with net-casting fishermen, but in which oth...

Ecological niche is traditionally defined at the species level, but individual niches can vary considerably within species. Research on intra-specific niche variation has been focussed on intrinsic drivers. However, differential transmission of socially learned behaviours can also lead to intra-specific niche variation. In sperm whales Physeter mac...

The functionality of distinct types of protein networks depends on the patterns of protein-protein interactions. A problem to solve is understanding the fragility of protein networks to predict system malfunctioning due to mutations and other errors. Spectral graph theory provides tools to understand the structural and dynamical properties of a sys...

The dynamic nature of animal societies often hides multiple layers of complexity. The field of animal behaviour is rapidly advancing with the development of increasingly sophisticated analytical methods that allow scientists to identify complex and nuanced drivers of social patterns. The resurgent interest in giraffe sociality illustrates this by c...

Aim We studied the underlying biotic and abiotic drivers of network patterns in marine cleaning mutualisms (species feeding upon ectoparasites and injured tissues of others) at large spatial scales. Location: Eleven marine biogeographical provinces. Time period: 1971–2018. Major taxa studied: Reef fish and shrimps. Methods We combined field and li...

Biological systems are organized as networks. A central problem in the study of biological networks is to understand if and how the network structure affects the fragility of biological systems to multiple types of perturbations. For example, the functionality and fragility of protein networks may depend on their network structure, and mutations an...

Social vertebrates commonly form foraging groups whose members repeatedly interact with one another and are often genetically related. Many species also exhibit within‐population specializations, which can range from preferences to forage in particular areas through to specializing on the type of prey they catch. However, within‐population structur...

According to theory, individuals forage in ways that maximize net energy intake. Distinct foraging strategies may emerge within a population in response to heterogeneous resources, competition and learning, among other drivers. We assessed individual variation in, and ecological consequences of, an unusual, specialized foraging tactic between anima...

Tropical reefs are, figuratively, the underwater counterparts of tropical rainforests. Both complex, three-dimensional natural systems harbour an impressive diversity of species. The diversity of ecological interactions taking place among these species is no less striking: their intricate webs add another level of complexity to these natural system...

Estimating population parameters is essential for understanding the ecology of species, which ultimately helps to assess their conservation status. The seahorse Hippocampus reidi is directly exposed to anthropogenic threats along the Brazilian coast, but the species still figures as Data Deficient (DD) at IUCN’s Red List. To provide better informat...

Acoustic communication is a taxonomically widespread phenomenon, crucial for social animals. We evaluate social sounds from bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) of Laguna, southern Brazil, whose social structure is organized around a cooperative for- aging tactic with artisanal fishermen. This tactic involves stereotyped and coordinated behavio...

While population sizes and structures naturally fluctuate over time, rapid within-generation changes are usually driven by shifts in habitat quality and (or) abrupt mortality. We evaluate how sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus L., 1758 = Physeter catodon L., 1758) responded to the dynamic habit off the Galápagos Islands over 30 years, relating it...

Biological networks pervade nature. They describe systems throughout all levels of biological organization, from molecules regulating metabolism to species interactions that shape ecosystem dynamics. The network thinking revealed recurrent organizational patterns in complex biological systems, such as the formation of semi-independent groups of con...