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76 results for “social foraging”
Density-dependence and territorial competitors can modulate parrotfish social foraging and herbivory on coral reefs
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Foraging behaviour alters with social environment in a juvenile songbird
Early independence from parents is a critical period where social information acquired vertically may become outdated, or conflict with new information. However, across natural populations it is unclear if newly-independent young persist in using information from parents, or if group-level effects of conformity override previous behaviours. Here we test if wild juvenile hihi (<em>Notiomystis cincta</em>, a New Zealand passerine) retain a foraging behaviour from parents, or if they change in response to the behaviour of peers. We provided feeding stations to parents during chick-rearing to seed alternative access routes, and then tracked their offspring's behaviour. Once independent, juveniles formed mixed-treatment social groups, where they did not retain preferences that we detected when with parents. Instead, juvenile groups converged over time to use one access route per group, and juveniles that moved between groups switched to copy the locally-favoured option. Juvenile hihi did not copy specific individuals, even if they were more familiar with the preceding bird. Our study shows that early social experiences with parents affect initial foraging decisions, but social environments encountered later on can update transmission of arbitrary behaviours. This suggests that conformity may be widespread in animal groups, with potential cultural, ecological, and evolutionary consequences.
Social partners and temperature jointly affect morning foraging activity of small birds in winter
Daily foraging activity of small wintering birds is classically thought to be driven by the need to gather enough energy reserves to survive each night. A separate line of research has shown that sociality is a major driver in winter foraging activities in many species. Here, we use wintering birds as a study system to move towards an integrative understanding of the influence of energy requirements and sociality on foraging ecology. We used RFID-enabled feeders in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA in January-March 2019 to measure foraging activity in two species (downy woodpecker, <i>Picoides pubescens</i>, and white-breasted nuthatches, <i>Sitta carolinensis</i>). We analyzed the relationship between overnight temperature and morning foraging activity and found that lowest overnight temperature was negatively correlated with morning visitation at feeders. We then used a network approach to ask if flock associations explain similarity in birds' foraging activity. In both species, individuals with stronger associations in a social network were more likely to share similar feeder activity, and an index of social partners' activity explained foraging activity better than overnight temperature. This brings forth new questions about the interplay between individual response to temperature and social factors in shaping how small animals cope with harsh winter conditions.
Data from: Seasonal food scarcity prompts long-distance foraging by a wild social bee
Foraging is an essential process for mobile animals and its optimization serves as a foundational theory in ecology and evolution; however, drivers of foraging are rarely investigated across landscapes and seasons. Using a common bumble bee species from the Western US (Bombus vosnesenskii), we ask if seasonal decreases in food resources prompt changes in foraging behavior and space use. We employ a unique integration of population genetic tools and spatially-explicit foraging models to estimate foraging distances and rates of patch visitation for wild bumble bee colonies across three study regions and two seasons. By mapping the locations of 669 wild-caught individual foragers, we find substantial variation in colony-level foraging distances, often exhibiting a 60-fold difference within a study region. Our analysis of visitation rates indicates that foragers display a preference for high-cover destination patches and forage significantly further for these patches, but only in the summer, when landscape-level resources are low. Overall, these results indicate that an increasing proportion of long-distance foraging bouts take place in the summer. As pollinators, the foraging dynamics of wild bees are of urgent concern given the potential impacts of global change on their movement and services. The behavioral shift towards long-distance foraging with seasonal declines in food resources suggests a novel phenologically-directed approach to landscape-level pollinator conservation and increased evaluation of late-season floral resources.
Data from: Direct fitness benefits and kinship of social foraging groups in an Old World tropical babbler
Molecular studies have revealed that social groups composed mainly of non-relatives may be widespread in group-living vertebrates, but the benefits favoring such sociality are not well understood. In the Old World, birds often form conspecific foraging groups that are maintained year-round and offspring usually disperse to other social groups. We tested the hypothesis that non-breeding group members are largely unrelated and gain direct fitness benefits through breeding opportunities (males) and brood parasitism (females) in the tropical grey-throated babbler, Stachyris nigriceps, in Malaysian Borneo. Babblers foraged in social groups containing one or more breeding pairs (median = 8 group members of equal sex ratio), but group members rarely assisted with breeding (9% of 67 breeding pairs had a third helper; exhibiting facultative cooperative breeding). Although 20% of 266 group member dyads were first-order relatives of one or both members of the breeding pairs, 80% were unrelated. Male group members gained direct fitness benefits through extra-pair and extra-group paternity (25% of 73 offspring), which was independent of their relatedness to the breeding pair and increased with decreasing group size. In contrast, females did not gain direct fitness benefits through brood parasitism. The low levels of relatedness and helping in social groups suggest that most group members do not gain indirect fitness benefits by helping to raise unrelated offspring. These findings highlight the importance of examining benefits of sociality for unrelated individuals that largely do not help and broaden the direct fitness benefits of group foraging beyond assumed survival benefits.
Data from: Multiple effects of weather on common waxbill group foraging and social behavior
<p>The weather poses challenges for wildlife. Environmental challenges can be responded to at the group level by social animals, but the influence of weather on group behavior is poorly understood. We investigated how the weather affects behavior in a gregarious species by monitoring common waxbills <em>(Estrilda astrild</em>) in a large mesocosm during five years. We found seasonal patterns on collective foraging, aggressiveness, and the structure of the social network, usually showing two cycles per year: one peaking in Spring and a smaller one in late Summer. Controlling for seasonality, we found behavioral changes related to increased energy demands on colder and/or cloudier days, such as more frequent and larger foraging groups that resulted in less structured social networks. Rain and wind disturb movement, and we found that on rainy days foraging group journeys became briefer and more synchronous, resulting in stronger associations between individuals and less structured networks, and that on windy days foraging groups were less frequent, larger, and with more within-group aggression. The results show that the weather has more varied effects than anticipated on ecologically-relevant group behavior. We discuss how such weather-related effects can improve predictions of how social animals will react to environmental changes.</p>
When should bees be flower constant? An agent-based model highlights the importance of social information and foraging conditions
<p>1. Many bee species show flower constancy, i.e. a tendency to visit flowers of one type during a foraging trip. Flower constancy is important for plant reproduction, but the benefits of constancy to bees are unclear. Social bees, which often use communication about food sources, show particularly strong flower constancy.</p> <p>2. We aimed to better understand the benefits of flower constancy in social bees and how these benefits depend on foraging conditions. We hypothesised that sharing social information increases the benefits of flower constancy because social foragers share information selectively about high-quality food sources, thereby reducing the need to sample alternatives.</p> <p>3. We developed an agent-based model that allowed us to simulate bee colonies with and without communication and flower constancy in different foraging environments. By varying key environmental parameters, such as food source numbers and reward size, we explored how the costs and benefits of flower constancy depend on the foraging landscape.</p> <p>4. Flower constancy alone performed poorly in all environments, while indiscriminate flower choice was often the most successful strategy. However, communication improved the performance of flower constant colonies considerably in most environments. This combination was particularly successful when high-quality food sources were abundant and competition was weak.</p> <p>5. Our findings help explain why social bees tend to be more flower constant than solitary bees and suggest that flower constancy can be an adaptive strategy in social bees. Simulations suggest that anthropogenic changes of foraging landscapes will have different effects on the foraging performance of bees that vary in flower constancy.</p>
Social interactions differ in their impact on foraging decisions
<p>Data and code for the manuscript: Social interactions differ in their impact on foraging decisions</p>
Increased initial task difficulty drives social foragers to develop sub-optimal conformity instead of adaptive diversity
<p>The extent to which animal societies exhibit social conformity as opposed to behavioural diversity is commonly attributed to adaptive learning strategies. Less attention is given to the possibility that the relative difficulty of learning a task socially as opposed to individually can be critical for social learning dynamics. Here we show that by raising initial task difficulty, house sparrows previously shown to exhibit adaptive social diversity become predominantly conformists. The task we used required opening feeding well covers (easier to learn socially) and to choose the covers with the rewarding cues (easy to learn individually). We replicated a previous study where sparrows exhibited adaptive diversity, but did not pre-train the naive sparrows to open covers, making the task initially more difficult. In sharp contrast to the previous study results, most sparrows continued to conform to the demonstrated cue even after experiencing greater success with the alternative rewarding cue for which competition was less intense. Thus, our study shows that a task's cognitive demands, such as the initial dependency on social demonstration, can change the entire learning dynamics, causing social animals to exhibit sub-optimal social conformity rather than adaptive diversity under otherwise identical conditions.</p>
Repercussions of Patrilocal Residence on Mothers’ Social Support Networks Among Tsimane Forager-Farmers
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Data from: Multiple effects of weather on common waxbill group foraging and social behavior
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Data from: Urbanization and the temporal patterns of social networks and group foraging behaviours
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Increased initial task difficulty drives social foragers to develop sub-optimal conformity instead of adaptive diversity
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Data from: Seasonal food scarcity prompts long-distance foraging by a wild social bee
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Discovery-defense strategy as a mechanism of social foraging of ants in tropical rainforest canopies
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Foraging behaviour alters with social environment in a juvenile songbird
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When should bees be flower constant? An agent-based model highlights the importance of social information and foraging conditions
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Data from: Direct fitness benefits and kinship of social foraging groups in an Old World tropical babbler
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Context-driven communication during deep-sea foraging in a social toothed whale
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Optimal foraging can drive emergent initiator-follower dynamics in social groups
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Allen Brain Atlas
Allen Brain Atlas is an Allen Institute collection of brain map atlases, datasets, APIs, and analysis tools covering mouse, human, and non-human primate brain resources.
Annotated Behaviour and Observability Dataset (ABODe)
ABODe is a University of Edinburgh DataShare dataset for behavior classification in group-housed mice using home-cage video, identities, bounding boxes, ground-plate positions, and annotator labels.
DANDI Archive for NWB datasets
DANDI is a BRAIN Initiative archive for publishing and sharing neurophysiology data, including electrophysiology, optophysiology, and behavioral data packaged as NWB and related standards.
International Brain Laboratory public data
The International Brain Laboratory public data releases expose standardized mouse decision-making experiments, including Neuropixels recordings, widefield calcium imaging, behavior, and session metadata accessed through the ONE API.
OpenNeuro
OpenNeuro is a free, open platform for sharing neuroimaging datasets, with public search, dataset pages, and download paths for web, S3, DataLad, and the OpenNeuro CLI.