Abstract
Many factors, including the demonstrator’s sex, status, and familiarity, shape the nature and magnitude of social learning. Given the important role of pair bonds in socially-monogamous animals, we predicted that these intimate relationships would promote the use of social information, and tested this hypothesis in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Observer birds witnessed either their mate or another familiar, opposite-sex bird eat from one, but not a second novel food source, before being allowed to feed from both food sources themselves. Birds used social information to make foraging decisions, but not all individuals used this information in the same way. While most individuals copied the foraging choice of the demonstrator as predicted, paired males did not, instead avoiding the feeder demonstrated by their mate. Our findings reveal that sex and pairing status interact to influence the use of social information and suggest that paired males might use social information to avoid competing with their mate.
Highlights
Social learning allows animals to obtain information about novel resources quickly but the information obtained can be less reliable than that derived from personal experience (Danchin et al, 2004; Laland, 2004)
Our data show that forming pair bonds impacts how individuals use social information in foraging
Males who had formed pair bonds surprisingly avoided copying the feeder demonstrated by their mate
Summary
Social learning allows animals to obtain information about novel resources quickly but the information obtained can be less reliable than that derived from personal experience (Danchin et al, 2004; Laland, 2004). Employing social learning entails the dilemma of choosing which particular individual(s) to copy (Galef, 2009; Hoppitt and Laland, 2013). Given that familiarity encourages social learning (Guillette et al, 2016), it seems likely that pair bonds between mates would further promote mechanisms of information transfer and thereby impact ‘who to copy’ strategies (Coussi-Korbel and Fragaszy, 1995; Jolles et al, 2013), but this potential influence has rarely been examined. Two studies examined jackdaw (Corvus monedula) social foraging and show that this species surprisingly did not learn faster or more from mates than other birds (Wechsler 1988; Schwab et al, 2008), potentially due to their fairly unusual degree of food sharing among affiliates (Schwab et al, 2008)
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