Joana Augusto

It Takes a Village to Raise a Pilot Whale

About the Speaker

Joana Augusto is a Coordinator of Volunteer and Professional Development and Training at Let’s Talk Science. She holds a MSc in Marine Ecology from the University of Lisbon and a PhD in Biology from Dalhousie University. During her master’s, she studied the social structure of a small resident population of bottlenose dolphins in Portugal. She then moved to Halifax, Canada, to complete her PhD while exploring the social structure of the long-finned pilot whales that spend the summer off Cape Breton. Joana’s thesis focused on combining data collected from photos, behavior, and genetics to understand the social lives of pilot whales, including how they care for their babies. During her studies, she realized her passion for teaching science and making it accessible to others.

It Takes a Village to Raise a Pilot Whale

Long finned pilot whales are known to be social animals that live in units that can stay together for several years. Other social cetaceans, like bottlenose dolphins, orcas and sperm whales, are known to allocare for their young - having an adult, other than the parent, spend time with the young. We investigated if allocare was happening, and how, in the population of pilot whales that summers off Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. We found that allocare was common and happened with calves across different age groups. The surprising results were that allocarers didn’t belong to the same social units as mothers, some of them were male and we couldn’t find any cases of reciprocity (you take care of my calf, I’ll take care of yours).