Experimental Evidence that Social Relationships Determine Individual Foraging Behavior
Experimental Evidence that Social Relationships Determine Individual Foraging Behavior
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DOI：
10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.075
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发表时间：
2015-12-07
期刊：
影响因子：
9.2
通讯作者：
Sheldon, Ben C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Firth, Josh A.;Voelkl, Bernhard;Sheldon, Ben C.
社会关系是生活在复杂社会中的动物的基础[1-3]。个体在多大程度上根据他们的关键社会关系做出决定，以及这对他们的行为和更广泛的人口水平过程的影响，仍然是未知的。使用一个新的实验，控制个别野生鸟类（大山雀，山雀）可以获得食物，我们限制交配对被允许在同一地点觅食。这就给结对成员带来了维护社会关系和获取资源之间的冲突。我们发现，个人减少自己获得食物，以维持他们的关系和个人觅食活动的强烈影响，他们的主要社会同行。社会关系通过影响个人的去向，决定了他们遇到的同种，从而塑造了他们的其他社会联系。因此，虽然资源分配可以决定个人的空间和社会环境[4-8]，但我们说明了关键的社会关系本身如何支配更广泛的社会结构。最后，社会关系也影响了社会觅食策略的发展。为了应对放弃获得资源，维持配对关系导致个体发展出一种灵活的“乞讨”策略，特别是从配对伴侣那里乞讨。这表明，行为可塑性的发展可以改善社会关系和其他需求之间的冲突。总之，这些结果说明了考虑社会关系解释行为变异的重要性，因为它们对个人行为的重大影响，并证明了更广泛的过程中的关键关系的后果。
Social relationships are fundamental to animals living in complex societies [1-3]. The extent to which individuals base their decisions around their key social relationships, and the consequences this has on their behavior and broader population level processes, remains unknown. Using a novel experiment that controlled where individual wild birds (great tits, Parus major) could access food, we restricted mated pairs from being allowed to forage at the same locations. This introduced a conflict for pair members between maintaining social relationships and accessing resources. We show that individuals reduce their own access to food in order to sustain their relationships and that individual foraging activity was strongly influenced by their key social counterparts. By affecting where individuals go, social relationships determined which conspecifics they encountered and consequently shaped their other social associations. Hence, while resource distribution can determine individuals' spatial and social environment [4-8], we illustrate how key social relationships themselves can govern broader social structure. Finally, social relationships also influenced the development of social foraging strategies. In response to forgoing access to resources, maintaining pair bonds led individuals to develop a flexible "scrounging" strategy, particularly by scrounging from their pair mate. This suggests that behavioral plasticity can develop to ameliorate conflicts between social relationships and other demands. Together, these results illustrate the importance of considering social relationships for explaining behavioral variation due to their significant impact on individual behavior and demonstrate the consequences of key relationships for wider processes.