Farine, DR, Aplin, LM, Garroway, CJ et al. (2 more authors) (2014) Collective decision making and social interaction rules in mixed-species flocks of songbirds. Animal Behaviour, 95. 173 - 182. ISSN 0003-3472
Abstract
Associations in mixed-species foraging groups are common in animals, yet have rarely been explored in the context of collective behaviour. Despite many investigations into the social and ecological conditions under which individuals should form groups, we still know little about the specific behavioural rules that individuals adopt in these contexts, or whether these can be generalized to heterospecifics. Here, we studied collective behaviour in flocks in a community of five species of woodland passerine birds. We adopted an automated data collection protocol, involving visits by RFID-tagged birds to feeding stations equipped with antennae, over two winters, recording 91 576 feeding events by 1904 individuals. We demonstrated highly synchronized feeding behaviour within patches, with birds moving towards areas of the patch with the largest proportion of the flock. Using a model of collective decision making, we then explored the underlying decision rule birds may be using when foraging in mixed-species flocks. The model tested whether birds used a different decision rule for conspecifics and heterospecifics, and whether the rules used by individuals of different species varied. We found that species differed in their response to the distribution of conspecifics and heterospecifics across foraging patches. However, simulating decisions using the different rules, which reproduced our data well, suggested that the outcome of using different decision rules by each species resulted in qualitatively similar overall patterns of movement. It is possible that the decision rules each species uses may be adjusted to variation in mean species abundance in order for individuals to maintain the same overall flock-level response. This is likely to be important for maintaining coordinated behaviour across species, and to result in quick and adaptive flock responses to food resources that are patchily distributed in space and time.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2014 The Authors. Published on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). |
Keywords: | Collective behaviour; Cyanistes caeruleus; Decision making; Interspecific interaction; Mixed-species flocking; Paridae; Parus major; Social information use |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Statistics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 09 Oct 2015 14:09 |
Last Modified: | 15 Jan 2018 18:16 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.07.008 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier Masson |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.07.008 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:89132 |