scholarly journals Social transmission of egg rejection in a cuckoo host

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Canchao Yang ◽  
William E Feeney
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Egg Rejection ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rapid Dissemination ◽  
Barn Swallows

AbstractSocial learning can enable the rapid dissemination of behaviors throughout a population. Rejection of foreign eggs is a key defense in hosts of avian brood parasites; however, whether social cues can inform whether a host rejects an egg remains unknown. Here, we aimed to determine whether access to social information can influence egg rejection behavior in semi-colonial barn swallows (Hirundo rustica). By manipulating the social information available from a neighboring nest, we found that swallows that had access to social information (i.e. neighbor recently rejected an egg) were more likely to reject a foreign egg compared to those that did not have access to social information (i.e. neighbor did not reject an egg). This result provides the first empirical evidence that egg rejection behavior can solely be informed by social information, and in doing so highlights the dynamic nature of defenses that hosts can deploy against brood parasitism.

scholarly journals Social learning and networks in Nestor parrots

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Daniel Donoghue
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Tool Use ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Habitat Modification ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Video Playback ◽  
Food Aversion ◽  
Network Analyses ◽  
The Social

<p>Social learning and network analyses are theorised to be of great utility in the context of behavioural conservation. For example, harnessing a species’ capacity for social learning may allow researchers to seed useful information into populations, while network analyses could provide a useful tool to monitor community stability, and predict pathways of pathogen transfer. Thus, an understanding of how individuals learn and the nature of the social networks within a population could enable the development of new behavioural based conservation interventions for species facing rapid environmental change, such as human-induced habitat modification. Parrots, the most threatened avian order worldwide, are notably underrepresented in the social learning and social network literature. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap by exploring social learning and networks using two endangered species of parrot; kākā (Nestor meridionalis) and kea (Nestor notabilis). The first study explores social learning of tool use in captive kea, using a trained kea demonstrator. The results from this experiment indicate that both social learning and play behaviour facilitated the uptake of tool use, and suggests that kea are highly sensitive to social information even when presented with complex tasks. The second study assesses whether wild kākā can socially learn novel string-pulling and food aversion behaviours from video playbacks of conspecific demonstrators. Although there was no evidence to indicate that kākā learn socially, these individuals also show no notable reaction to video playback of a familiar predator. Therefore, these results are likely due to difficulties in interpreting information on the screens, and not necessarily a reflection of their ability to perceive social information. In the final study, social network analysis (SNA) was performed to map social connectivity within wellington’s urban kākā population. SNA indicates that kākā form non-random social bonds, selectively associating with some individuals more than others, and also show high levels of dissimilarity in community composition at different feeding sites. Taken together, these results provide rare empirical evidence of social learning in a parrot species and suggest that even complicated seeded behaviours can quickly spread to other individuals. These findings may also be indicative of the difficulties in conducting video playback experiments in wild conditions, which is an area in need of future research. Overall, these findings contribute to the very limited body of research on social learning and networks in parrots, and provide information of potential value in the management of these species.</p>

scholarly journals Social learning and networks in Nestor parrots

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Donoghue
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Tool Use ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Habitat Modification ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Video Playback ◽  
Food Aversion ◽  
Network Analyses ◽  
The Social

<p>Social learning and network analyses are theorised to be of great utility in the context of behavioural conservation. For example, harnessing a species’ capacity for social learning may allow researchers to seed useful information into populations, while network analyses could provide a useful tool to monitor community stability, and predict pathways of pathogen transfer. Thus, an understanding of how individuals learn and the nature of the social networks within a population could enable the development of new behavioural based conservation interventions for species facing rapid environmental change, such as human-induced habitat modification. Parrots, the most threatened avian order worldwide, are notably underrepresented in the social learning and social network literature. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap by exploring social learning and networks using two endangered species of parrot; kākā (Nestor meridionalis) and kea (Nestor notabilis). The first study explores social learning of tool use in captive kea, using a trained kea demonstrator. The results from this experiment indicate that both social learning and play behaviour facilitated the uptake of tool use, and suggests that kea are highly sensitive to social information even when presented with complex tasks. The second study assesses whether wild kākā can socially learn novel string-pulling and food aversion behaviours from video playbacks of conspecific demonstrators. Although there was no evidence to indicate that kākā learn socially, these individuals also show no notable reaction to video playback of a familiar predator. Therefore, these results are likely due to difficulties in interpreting information on the screens, and not necessarily a reflection of their ability to perceive social information. In the final study, social network analysis (SNA) was performed to map social connectivity within wellington’s urban kākā population. SNA indicates that kākā form non-random social bonds, selectively associating with some individuals more than others, and also show high levels of dissimilarity in community composition at different feeding sites. Taken together, these results provide rare empirical evidence of social learning in a parrot species and suggest that even complicated seeded behaviours can quickly spread to other individuals. These findings may also be indicative of the difficulties in conducting video playback experiments in wild conditions, which is an area in need of future research. Overall, these findings contribute to the very limited body of research on social learning and networks in parrots, and provide information of potential value in the management of these species.</p>

scholarly journals Individual exploration and selective social learning: Balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ketika Garg ◽  
Christopher T. Kello ◽  
Paul E Smaldino
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Optimal Combination ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Lévy Walks ◽  
Power Law Exponent ◽  
Collective Foraging ◽  
Exploration Exploitation

Search requires balancing exploring for more options and exploiting the ones previously found. Individuals foraging in a group face another trade-off: whether to engage in social learning to exploit the solutions found by others or to solitarily search for unexplored solutions. Social learning can decrease the costs of finding new resources, but excessive social learning can decrease the exploration for new solutions. We study how these two trade-offs interact to influence search efficiency in a model of collective foraging under conditions of varying resource abundance, resource density, and group size. We modeled individual search strategies as Lévy walks, where a power-law exponent (μ) controlled the trade-off between exploitative and explorative movements in individual search. We modulated the trade-off between individual search and social learning using a selectivity parameter that determined how agents responded to social cues in terms of distance and likely opportunity costs. Our results show that social learning is favored in rich and clustered environments, but also that the benefits of exploiting social information are maximized by engaging in high levels of individual exploration. We show that selective use of social information can modulate the disadvantages of excessive social learning, especially in larger groups and with limited individual exploration. Finally, we found that the optimal combination of individual exploration and social learning gave rise to trajectories with μ ≈ 2 and provide support for the general optimality such patterns in search. Our work sheds light on the interplay between individual search and social learning, and has broader implications for collective search and problem-solving.

scholarly journals No differences between autistic and non-autistic adults in social influence on risky decision-making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Hickman ◽  
Connor Keating ◽  
Jennifer Cook ◽  
Elliot Andrew Ludvig
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Risky Choice ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Risky Decision Making ◽  
Risky Decision ◽  
The Social ◽  
Comparable Performance ◽  
Autistic Adults

Everyday risky decisions are susceptible to influence from a variety of sources, including the social context in which decisions take place. In the general population, people update their risk preferences based on knowledge of choices made by previous participants. In this study, we examined the influence of social information on the risky decision-making of autistic adults, a group in which differences in social processing have been observed. Autistic and non-autistic adults completed a risky decision-making task in the presence of both social and non-social information, either choosing for themselves or someone else on each trial. Notably, the social information comprised tokens that represented preferences of previous participants and was thus devoid of overt social cues such as faces or gestures. The non-social condition comprised a previously validated method where tokens represented “preferences” generated by weighted roulette wheels. Participants significantly shifted their choices when the influence (social or non-social) suggested a less risky choice. There were no group differences in risky decision-making when deciding for oneself compared to others. Interestingly, no differences in the effects of social and non-social influence were found between autistic and non-autistic adults. Considering previous evidence of social influence differences when using overtly social cues, we suggest that the removal of social cues in our paradigm led to comparable performance between the autistic and non-autistic groups. The current study paves the way for future studies investigating a confounding effect of social cues, which will lead to important insight for theories of social influence in autism.

scholarly journals The costs of avian brood parasitism explain variation in egg rejection behaviour in hosts

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 20150296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iliana Medina ◽  
Naomi E. Langmore
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Host Species ◽  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Egg Rejection ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
Avian Brood Parasitism ◽  
First Time ◽  
Rejection Rates

Many bird species can reject foreign eggs from their nests. This behaviour is thought to have evolved in response to brood parasites, birds that lay their eggs in the nest of other species. However, not all hosts of brood parasites evict parasitic eggs. In this study, we collate data from egg rejection experiments on 198 species, and perform comparative analyses to understand the conditions under which egg rejection evolves. We found evidence, we believe for the first time in a large-scale comparative analysis, that (i) non-current host species have rejection rates as high as current hosts, (ii) egg rejection is more likely to evolve when the parasite is relatively large compared with its host and (iii) egg rejection is more likely to evolve when the parasite chick evicts all the host eggs from the nest, such as in cuckoos. Our results suggest that the interactions between brood parasites and their hosts have driven the evolution of egg rejection and that variation in the costs inflicted by parasites is fundamental to explaining why only some host species evolve egg rejection.

scholarly journals Male African elephants discriminate and prefer vocalizations of unfamiliar females

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela S. Stoeger ◽  
Anton Baotic
Keyword(s):  
Social Information ◽  
Loxodonta Africana ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Acoustic Cues ◽  
African Elephants ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
High Association ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mating Opportunities ◽  
Vocal Discrimination

Abstract Gaining information about conspecifics via long-distance vocalizations is crucial for social and spatially flexible species such as the African elephant (Loxodonta africana). Female elephants are known to discriminate individuals and kin based on acoustic cues. Specifically, females approached the loudspeaker exclusively with playbacks of familiar individuals with high association indexes, intentionally fusing with their affiliates. For males, which are less bonded, gathering social information via vocalizations could still have important implications, but little is known about their vocal discrimination skills. We experimentally tested the ability of male African elephants to discriminate the social rumbles of familiar (from the same population) versus unfamiliar females. Male elephants discriminated and preferentially moved towards the rumbles of unfamiliar females, showing longer attentive reactions and significantly more orientating (facing and approaching the speaker) behavior. The increased orientating response of males towards playbacks of unfamiliar females is converse to the reaction of female subjects. Our results provide evidence that male elephants extract social information from vocalizations, yet with a different intention than females. Accordingly, males might use social cues in vocalizations to assess mating opportunities, which may involve selection to identify individuals or kin in order to avoid inbreeding.

scholarly journals Copy-when-uncertain: bumblebees rely on social information when rewards are highly variable

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 20160188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Smolla ◽  
Sylvain Alem ◽  
Lars Chittka ◽  
Susanne Shultz
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Agent Based Model ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Variable Environments ◽  
Foraging Decisions

To understand the relative benefits of social and personal information use in foraging decisions, we developed an agent-based model of social learning that predicts social information should be more adaptive where resources are highly variable and personal information where resources vary little. We tested our predictions with bumblebees and found that foragers relied more on social information when resources were variable than when they were not. We then investigated whether socially salient cues are used preferentially over non-social ones in variable environments. Although bees clearly used social cues in highly variable environments, under the same conditions they did not use non-social cues. These results suggest that bumblebees use a ‘copy-when-uncertain’ strategy.

scholarly journals Individual differences in learning behaviours in humans: Asocial exploration tendency does not predict reliance on social learning

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wataru Toyokawa ◽  
Yoshimatsu Saito ◽  
Tatsuya Kameda
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Social Learning ◽  
Learning Strategies ◽  
Learning Strategy ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Information Use ◽  
Exploration Exploitation

AbstractA number of empirical studies have suggested that individual differences in asocial exploration tendencies in animals may be related to those in social information use. However, because the ‘exploration tendency’ in most previous studies has been measured without considering the exploration-exploitation trade-off, it is yet hard to conclude that the animal asocial ‘exploration-exploitation’ tendency may be tied to social information use. Here, we studied human learning behaviour in both asocial and social multi-armed bandit tasks. By fitting reinforcement learning models including asocial and/or social decision processes, we measured each individual’s (1) asocial exploration tendency and (2) social information use. We found consistent individual differences in the exploration tendency in the asocial tasks. We also found substantive heterogeneity in the adopted learning strategies in the social task: One-third of participants were most likely to have used the copy-when-uncertain strategy, while the remaining two-thirds were most likely to have relied only on asocial learning. However, we found no significant individual association between the exploration frequency in the asocial task and the use of the social learning strategy in the social task. Our results suggest that the social learning strategies may be independent from the asocial search strategies in humans.

scholarly journals Curiosity is Contagious: A Social Influence Intervention to Induce Curiosity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachit Dubey ◽  
Hermish Mehta ◽  
Tania Lombrozo
Keyword(s):  
Social Influence ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Dramatic Effect ◽  
Social Cue ◽  
The Social ◽  
On Line ◽  
Subsequent Behavior ◽  
Scientific Questions

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: the social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on-line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up-votes as a social cue to popularity. Participants indicated their curiosity about the answers, and they were given an opportunity to reveal a subset of those answers. Participants reported greater curiosity about the answers to questions when the questions were presented with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes, and they were also more likely to choose to reveal the answers to questions with a high (vs. low) number of up-votes. These effects were partially mediated by surprise and by the inferred usefulness of knowledge, with a more dramatic effect of low up-votes in reducing curiosity than of high up-votes in boosting curiosity. Taken together, these results highlight the important role social information plays in shaping our curiosity.

scholarly journals Fate of Grackle (Quiscalus SPP.) Defenses in the Absence of Brood Parasitism: Implications for Long-Term Parasite-Host Coevolution

The Auk ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 121 (4) ◽  
pp. 1172-1186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Peer ◽  
Spencer G. Sealy
Keyword(s):  
Host Species ◽  
Brood Parasitism ◽  
Selection Pressure ◽  
Egg Rejection ◽  
Allopatric Population ◽  
Brood Parasites ◽  
Cowbird Parasitism ◽  
The Common ◽  
Molothrus Aeneus

Abstract We tested grackles (Quiscalus spp.) to determine whether they retain egg rejection behavior in the absence of the selection pressure of brood parasitism. Neither Bronzed Cowbird (Molothrus aeneus) nor Brown-headed Cowbird (M. ater) parasitism was recorded in 797 Great-tailed Grackle (Q. mexicanus) nests. Cross-fostered Bronzed Cowbird nestlings, but not Brown-headed Cowbird nestlings, fledged from Great-tailed Grackle nests, indicating that Brown-headed Cowbird parasitism does not select for rejection in these grackles. Great-tailed Grackle populations sympatric and allopatric with Bronzed Cowbirds rejected 100% of model cowbird eggs. An allopatric population of Boat-tailed Grackle (Q. major), a sister species of the Great-tailed Grackle, also rejected 100% of model eggs. Egg rejection in the Boat-tailed Grackle has apparently been retained in the absence of parasitism for as long as 800,000 years since it split from the Great-tailed Grackle. The Common Grackle (Q. quiscula), which lays the most variable eggs among the grackles, also has the lowest level of egg rejection—which is consistent with the argument that it may have lost most of its rejection behavior in the absence of parasitism. With extreme intraclutch egg-variation, Common Grackles may be more likely to reject their own oddly colored eggs, which would select against rejection behavior in the absence of parasitism. Those results have significant implications for long-term parasite-host coevolution, because they suggest that egg rejection has been retained in most species of Quiscalus in the absence of parasitism. If typical of the world's avifauna, such retention may force brood parasites to specialize on a few host species and to rarely return to using old hosts, which would readily reject their eggs.

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