Abstract
BackgroundSocial information use is usually considered to lead to ecological convergence among involved con- or heterospecific individuals. However, recent results demonstrate that observers can also actively avoid behaving as those individuals being observed, leading to ecological divergence. This phenomenon has been little explored so far, yet it can have significant impact on resource use, realized niches and species co-existence. In particular, the time-scale and the ecological context over which such shifts can occur are unknown. We examined with a long-term (four years) field experiment whether experimentally manipulated, species-specific, nest-site feature preferences (symbols on nest boxes) are transmitted across breeding seasons and affect future nest-site preferences in a guild of three cavity-nesting birds.ResultsOf the examined species, resident great tits (Parus major) preferred the symbol that had been associated with unoccupied nest boxes in the previous year, i.e., their preference shifted towards niche space previously unused by putative competitors and conspecifics.ConclusionsOur results show that animals can remember the earlier resource use of conspecifics and other guild members and adjust own decisions accordingly one year after. Our experiment cannot reveal the ultimate mechanism(s) behind the observed behaviour but avoiding costs of intra- or interspecific competition or ectoparasite load in old nests are plausible reasons. Our findings imply that interspecific social information use can affect resource sharing and realized niches in ecological time-scale through active avoidance of observed decisions and behavior of potentially competing species.
Highlights
Social information use is usually considered to lead to ecological convergence among involved con- or heterospecific individuals
In line with the predictions of social information use derived from intraspecific contexts, interspecific information use can result in copying and convergence of behavior [16,17], and active avoidance of the behavior of individuals that seem to have poor performance [6,16,18,19] or to avoid confrontation with stronger competitors
46.6% of the breeding pairs chose the symbol that was associated with an empty nest box in the previous year, which clearly differed from random expectation (χ2 = 15.38, df = 2, P < 0.0001)
Summary
Social information use is usually considered to lead to ecological convergence among involved con- or heterospecific individuals. Models of interspecific social information use [7,8,15] predict a more diverse set of possible net effects of species interactions; the presence of species with shared resource needs can result in facilitative effects This is because the presence or performance of putative competitors can be used as a source of information to adaptively adjust individual decisions, which is expected to result in a trade-off between costs of competition and benefits of information use with increasing ecological similarity, spatial proximity or temporal synchronization [7]. Interspecific information use has potential to either increase or decrease resource use overlap among coexisting species but the time-scale and the ecological context over which such shifts can occur is unclear
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