What's in a mate? Social pairing decisions and spatial cognitive ability in food-caching mountain chickadees

While researchers have investigated mating decisions for decades, gaps remain in our understanding of how behaviour influences social mate choice. We compared spatial cognitive performance and food caching propensity within social pairs of mountain chickadees inhabiting differentially harsh winter climates to understand how these measures contribute to social mate choice. Chickadees rely on specialized spatial cognitive abilities to recover food stores and survive harsh winters, and females can discriminate among males with varying spatial cognition. Because spatial cognition and caching propensity are critical for survival and likely heritable, pairing with a mate with such enhanced traits may provide indirect benefits to offspring. Comparing the behaviour of social mates, we found that spatial cognitive performance approached a significant correlation within pairs at low, but not at high elevation. We found no correlation within pairs in spatial reversal cognitive performance at either elevation; however, females at high elevation tended to perform better than their social mates. Finally, we found that caching propensity correlated within pairs at low, while males cached significantly more food than their social mates at high elevations. These results suggest that cognition and caching propensity may influence social mating decisions, but only in certain environments and for some aspects of cognition.