Wild jackdaws learn to tolerate juveniles to exploit new foraging opportunities

Abstract

Social tolerance can enhance access to resources and is thought to be crucial in facilitating the evolution of cooperation, social cognition and culture, but it is unknown whether animals can optimize their social tolerance through learning. We presented wild jackdaws (Corvus monedula) with a novel social information problem using automated feeders. Juveniles could always feed (simulating a situation where juveniles were sources of information about a new resource) but adults could only access food if they inhibited their tendency to displace juveniles and instead showed tolerance by occupying an adjacent feeder perch. Accordingly, adults learned to tolerate juveniles, with some evidence they generalized across juveniles as a cohort. The ability to learn to tolerate sources of valuable information, and generalize across cohorts of informed individuals, may facilitate adaptive responses in the face of environmental change and help to explain the success of jackdaws in human-dominated environments.

Keywords: aggression; flexibility; generalization; information use; learning; social; social information; social structure; tolerance.

Figure 1.

(a) Experimental array, showing an adult (right) in a successful co-occupation with a juvenile. RFID tags (lower circle), determine access to mealworms (upper circle) by motor-controlled doors. (b) The daily proportion of visits where adults successfully co-occupied experimental arrays with, or displaced, a juvenile.

Figure 2.

The difference in likelihood of an adult (a) co-occupation with, and (b) displacing a juvenile (orange) as opposed to another adult (blue) as adults acquired experience of joining co-occupations with juveniles. Lines and shaded areas represent median and 95% REM estimates.