Bottlenose dolphins are a large-brained, long-lived, highly social species, operating within a fission-fusion society characterized by broad multi-level social networks, extensive care giving and teaching of offspring, cooperative and diverse hunting tactics, long-term alliances, and learned vocal signals that broadcast an individual’s identity, can be used in referential exchanges and can be imitated by close associates.Observations of behavior and social interactions in the wild suggest that social cognition in the bottlenose dolphins is well developed.Over the past thrity years, experimental studies have revealed that bottlenose dolphins have decades long social memories of associates, can develop a broad concept of imitation that extends to arbitrary novel sounds and social behaviors presented in a variety of contexts as well as to self-initiated behaviors.Dolphins have also been shown to be able to learn about and appreciate the social requisites of cooperative behavior, can spontaneously understand the referential character of human-initiated social signals involving pointing and gazing, and can employ pointing productively in communicative exchanges with humans to achieve goals.Collectively, dolphin social-cognition abilities are sophisticated and similar in several aspects to those of other species living within complex social networks, such as elephants, chimpanzees, and humans.

This chapter offers a cultural epidemiology of digital communities, describing how these groups emerge, bond, and come to develop shared embodied experiences. We argue that online communities, while seemingly novel and often “strange," can offer insights into fundamental mechanisms of human sociality albeit on an unprecedented speed and scale due to specific affordances of cyberspace. After framing this argument, we outline a noncomprehensive anthropological survey of online communities of interest. Our hope is to provide a model for how online communities grow to share interphenomenal experiences despite lack of face-to-face interaction, and how this might inform our understanding of ordinary social cognition.