Differences in group size were first analyzed to determine if there was a change in average group size following the hurricanes. No significant difference was found, so further analysis on differences in group size in relation to calf presence and behavioral category were conducted on all encounters (2002–2007) with ANOVA and Tukey tests using SPSS 16 software. Behavior was categorized as forage, travel, social, forage/travel, social/travel, social/forage, and social/forage/travel. The latter four categories capture the fact that dolphin groups often

displayed multiple behavioral states within an encounter. Coefficients of association (CoAs) were calculated find more using the half-weight index (Cairns and Schwager 1987) with the software program SOCPROG 3-MA research buy 2.3 (Whitehead 2009). Encounters were only included in the analysis if more than 50% of individuals were identified. Due to these restrictions, the number of encounters used in the

CoA analysis was less than the total number of encounters observed. Calves were not included because their associations are dependent on their mothers’ associations. Annual CoAs for each year between 2002 and 2007 were calculated for noncalf individuals of known sex sighted three or more times within that year. Pooled CoAs were calculated for noncalf individuals of known sex sighted six or more times per pooled period (prehurricane 2002–2004, posthurricane 2005–2007). These sighting requirements selleck kinase inhibitor have given reliable, representative data (Whitehead 2008a, 2008b) for these spotted dolphins (Elliser and Herzing 2012; Elliser and Herzing, in press) and the sympatric bottlenose dolphins (Elliser

and Herzing 2011). If an individual changed age class within the pooled period, they were classified as the age class that they were two out of the three years. Observed associations were defined as all non-zero CoAs. Strong associations were defined as greater than twice the average CoA of the study group (Gero et al. 2005, Whitehead 2008a). SOCPROG was used to conduct permutation tests to determine if associations were nonrandom and if there were preferred/avoided companions (Christal and Whitehead 2001, Whitehead 2009). The sampling period was set to “day” and the number of permutations was increased until the P-value for the Standard Deviation (SD) stabilized at 10,000 permutations, with 100 flips per permutation (Whitehead 2009). The “permute all groups” test was chosen for the annual analysis, and the “permute groups within samples” test was used for the pooled data sets, to account for lack of individuals due to birth, death, migration, etc. Significantly high SD or CV of the real association indices indicate long-term preferred companionship and nonrandom associations (Whitehead 2009). If associations were found to be nonrandom, Mantel tests were conducted to examine whether differences in association occur between classes (e.g., sex and age classes).