When titmice find themselves in a new environment, they closely observe their local counterparts and learn tricks from them for finding food. This is shown by a study based on an experiment with great tits. To do this, the researchers first taught the birds in different groups to open a food box in one of two ways. They then placed some animals in the other group. If the tits found that the solution offered by their native species promised a higher reward, they quickly deviated from the strategy they had learned. Accordingly, immigration has a strong influence on how birds learn from each other.
In new environments, it is useful for animals to quickly become familiar with the new conditions and adapt their behavior accordingly. It has already been proven that chimpanzees, orangutans and many other primates rely on social learning in such situations. They observe other individuals who have lived there for a long time and imitate their strategies, for example when searching for food. Birds were also already known to be capable of social learning. However, what role a new environment plays in this was previously unclear.
Food box with various rewards
A team led by Michael Chimento from the University of Zurich has now clarified this question with an experiment. To do this, the researchers captured 144 wild great tits and kept them in several groups in aviaries. They taught one bird from each group to open a food box by sliding the door either to the right or to the left. One side only contained sunflower seeds, which the tits had access to independently of the food box, while the other side contained buffalo worms, which the tits prefer to grain food.
After the tutor bird was back in its group, the other aviary residents quickly learned to move the door so that they could get to the buffalo worms. For the actual experiment, the researchers then placed two birds in a new, slightly different aviary, which was also equipped with a food box. The buffalo worms were in their usual place. Instead of the unloved sunflower seeds, the other side contained a treat that great tits like to eat even more than buffalo worms: mealworms. This was known to the birds that had been living in this aviary for a long time. Would the newcomers stick with their learned behavior or would they discover the new, better reward?
Social learning in a new environment
The result: 80 percent of the newly bred birds chose the side with the mealworms on the first try. “Importantly, the newcomers did not know that a greater reward awaited them. They could only see the change by either watching residents use the box or trying the other side themselves,” says Chimento. “Of course we can’t ask the birds where they get their information from. However, the behavioral patterns clearly indicate that the newcomers observed the others very closely from the start.”
In further experiments, the team researched the factors influencing the social learning of great tits. If the new aviary was set up in the same way as the home aviary, the newcomers were less likely to copy the behavior of their conspecifics. The same was true if there was the same reward on both sides of the food box, so there was no advantage to changing the learned strategy. “In these cases, the newcomers relied more on individual than social learning,” report Chimento and his team.
“In summary, our results suggest that great tits observe the success of others and are more influenced by the socially observed differences when the environmental characteristics in their new environment differ,” said the researchers. “Our results support the hypothesis that spatial variability is a strong driving force for the development of social learning strategies.” For titmice, this social learning ability is likely to be of great importance in the wild. “In nature, animals often move from one environment to another,” explains Chimento’s colleague Lucy Aplin. “So they need a strategy to figure out which behaviors are good and which are bad in the new place.”
Source: Michael Chimento (University of Zurich, Switzerland) et al., PLOS Biology, doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002699