Abstract
Social foraging is thought to provide the possibility of information transmission between individuals, but this advantage has been proved only in a handful of species and contexts. We investigated how social connections in captive flocks of house sparrows (Passer domesticus) affected the discovery of (i.e. feeding for the first time from) two hidden food patches in the presence of informed flock-mates. At the first-discovered and most-exploited food patch social connections between birds affected the order of discovery and presumably contributed to a greater exploitation of this patch. However, social connections did not affect discovery at the second food patch despite its close spatial proximity. Males discovered the food sources sooner than females, while feeding activity was negatively related to patch discovery. Age had no effect on the order of discovery. Birds that first discovered and fed at the food patches were characterized by higher level of social indifference, i.e. followed others less frequently than other birds in an independent context. Our findings provide experimental evidence for the importance of variable social connections during social foraging in house sparrow flocks, and suggest that social attraction can contribute differently to the exploitation of different patches when multiple food sources are present.
Highlights
Animals often rely on social information when foraging: the presence of a conspecific individual at a food patch can transmit information about patch location, resource quality or accessibility[1,2,3]
Using the first feeding events, we investigated how the time of the discoveries predicted the extent of exploitation of the two food patches and how previously established social connections between flock-mates, measured in an independent context, and individual characteristics such as age, sex and feeding activity affected the order of discoveries among the naïve birds
There was a strong and significant negative correlation between the average time of first feeding and the amount of food loss at the first patch, but this relationship was weak and non-significant at the second patch. These findings indicate that uncertainty regarding patch location was likely to decrease over time as both patches became utilized by more and more individuals, first-feeding latencies predicted the extent of exploitation at the first, but not at the second patch
Summary
Animals often rely on social information when foraging: the presence of a conspecific individual at a food patch can transmit information about patch location, resource quality or accessibility[1,2,3]. In this study we collected data on individual latencies to discover (i.e. first feed) from two hidden food patches in captive house sparrow flocks In these flocks individuals did not have experience of these novel food sources, except for two informed flock-mates, which had been habituated to eat from similar hidden food patches, each marked with a colourful spot. Aside from the following-based networks, we generated homogeneous networks to model the situation when all individuals have equal opportunity to learn from each other [e.g. refs 24 and 26] In this case, solely the increasing number of informed individuals may exert an acceleratory effect on the rate of acquisition at the food patches[34]. With this set-up, we aimed to explore the effect of social attraction on patch discovery in foraging house sparrows and test whether variable social connections influence individuals’ foraging decisions
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