My interest lies on the emergence of animal culture and the process through which cultural behavioural traits are passed on among individuals. By combining behavioural and ecological data with molecular techniques, I will be able to assess the relative importance of social learning, ecological variation and relatedness on behavioural variation within animal populations. In my thesis, I will focus on both the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of how a recently discovered putative foraging technique ‘shelling’ is transmitted within a population of wild bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia.