Abstract
Social learning is the building block of culture and traditions in humans and nonhuman animals, and its study has a long history. Most investigations have addressed either the causation or the function of social learning. Though much is known about the underlying mechanisms of social learning, demonstrations of its adaptive value in a natural setting are lacking. Here we show that juvenile brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) can increase their foraging efficiency by copying adult diving behaviour, suggesting that social learning helps juveniles to find profitable food patches. Our findings demonstrate the potential fitness consequences of behavioural copying and thus highlight the possible adaptive importance of social learning.
Highlights
Social learning has fascinated sociologists, psychologists and biologists for a long time, and the last two decades have seen an explosion of both theoretical and empirical studies on social learning in animals [1,2,3,4]
There was strong evidence that copying adult behaviour increases the foraging success of the juvenile pelicans: When diving on their own, juveniles caught fish on an average of 33% of all hunting attempts, but they raised their proportion of successful plunge dives to 57% when reproducing the adult fishing behaviour
We observed that juvenile brown pelicans substantially increased their hunting success when copying adult diving behaviour
Summary
Social learning has fascinated sociologists, psychologists and biologists for a long time, and the last two decades have seen an explosion of both theoretical and empirical studies on social learning in animals [1,2,3,4]. Animals change their behaviour based upon information transferred from one individual to another. A prime example of social learning in animals is vocal learning [5] and vocal production learning in birds has been extensively studied [6,7,8]. Social transmission of behaviour can lead to copying [9], in which one animal matches the behaviour of another, thereby reproducing, for instance, patterns of movement or patch choices [10,11,12]. For instance, can learn the route to a food source by swimming with informed conspecifics, and in the process they copy the route from the other fish [17]
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