Corvid connections: how do social bonds influence stress, health, nutrition and cultural knowledge? (Ref: 4282)

像人类一样，许多动物在特定的个体之间形成稳定的社会关系。这些关系可能是非常有益的：在人类和其他灵长类动物中，拥有牢固关系的个体往往更健康，更少焦虑。然而，对其他动物的研究很少，也不清楚社会关系的好处如何与成本进行权衡。例如，与社会伙伴共度时光可以提高免疫功能，但也会增加感染风险。同样，如果你把大部分时间花在特定的合作伙伴身上，你就有可能错过从他人那里学习有价值信息的机会。为了理解这些权衡并阐明社会关系如何以及为什么演变，这个跨学科项目将研究生活在自然环境中的寒鸦，在那里它们会受到竞争，捕食和疾病的影响。使用最先进的现场实验，非侵入性压力测定和生理测量的组合，您将研究社会关系强度的变化如何影响个人压力水平，健康以及食物和知识的获取。寒鸦属于大脑大的鸦科动物，在动态的社交网络中形成持久的配对关系。我们的实地考察点包含数千只彩色环纹的、带有RFID标签的寒鸦，为量化社会纽带的强度提供了独特的机会。该项目汇集了监督团队在动物认知和实地实验（Thornton），社会关系和网络（King），行为内分泌学（Furtbauer）和疾病生态学（Bonneaud）方面的专业知识，将确定社会关系如何影响：1.压力：您将使用非侵入性热成像和激素测定来了解短期社交互动（例如与伴侣共同喂养）和长期社交措施的变化是否会介导压力水平。2.健康状况：寄生虫水平和免疫功能：使用最先进的生物分子实验室技术，您将量化各种寄生虫感染和免疫能力的存在和强度的个体差异。3.食物方面：使用自动喂食器记录所有来访鸟类的身份，你将测试社会伙伴的存在和身份如何改变迁移的概率和食物摄入量。4.知识：你将通过训练个体“示范者”使用自动喂食器来播种新的觅食创新，然后你将量化新行为的文化传播和社会网络结构的相关变化，以确定寒鸦是否可以调整它们的社会联系，向知识渊博的个体学习。总之，这项工作将为社会演变、文化传播和健康提供重要的见解。

Like humans, many animals form stable social relationships between specific individuals. These relationships can be extremely beneficial: in humans and other primates individuals with strong relationships tend to be healthier and less anxious.However, there has been little research on other animals and it is not clear how the benefits of social relationships trade off against costs. For instance, spending time with social partners could improve immune function but also increase exposure to infections. Similarly, if you spend most of your time with particular partners you risk missing out on opportunities to learn valuable information from others. To understand these trade-offs and shed light on how and why social relationships evolve, this interdisciplinary project will study jackdaws living in their natural environments where they are subject to competition, predation and disease. Using a combination of state-of the art field experiments, non-invasive stress assays and physiological measures you will examine how variation in the strength of social relationships influences individual stress levels, health and the acquisition of food and knowledge. Jackdaws are members of the large-brained corvid family that form enduring pair bonds embedded within dynamic social networks. Our fieldsites contain thousands of colour-ringed, RFID-tagged jackdaws, providing unique opportunities to quantify the strength of social bonds. Bringing together the supervisory team's expertise in animal cognition and field experiments (Thornton), social relationships and networks (King), behavioural endocrinology (Furtbauer) and disease ecology (Bonneaud) the project will determine how social relationships influence: 1. Stress: You will use non-invasive thermal imaging and hormonal assays to understand whether variability in short-term social interactions (e.g. co-feeding with partners) and long-term sociality measures mediate stress levels. 2. Health: Parasite levels and immune function: Using state-of-the art biomolecular lab techniques you will quantify individual variation in the presence and intensity of various parasitic infections and immunocompetence. 3. Food: using automated feeders that record the identity of all visiting birds, you will test how the presence and identity of social partners alters the probability of displacement and changes food intake. 4. Knowledge: you will seed novel foraging innovations by training individual "demonstrators" to access automated feeders.You will then quantify the cultural transmission of the new behaviour and associated changes in social network structure to determine whether jackdaws can adjust their social associations to learn from knowledgeable individuals. Together, this work will provide important insights into social evolution, cultural transmission and health.