Wild jackdaws learn to tolerate juveniles to exploit new foraging opportunities

Area of Science:

• Animal behavior
• Cognitive ecology
• Evolutionary biology

Background:

• Social tolerance is vital for resource acquisition and the evolution of cooperation, social cognition, and culture.
• The capacity for animals to learn and optimize social tolerance remains largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether wild jackdaws can learn to adjust their social tolerance.
• To determine if jackdaws can generalize learned tolerance across different individuals.

Main Methods:

• Wild jackdaws were presented with a novel social information task using automated feeders.
• Adult jackdaws learned to tolerate juvenile jackdaws to access food resources.
• Tolerance was measured by adults inhibiting displacement behavior and occupying adjacent feeder perches.

Main Results:

• Adult jackdaws successfully learned to tolerate juveniles to gain access to food.
• Evidence suggests that adults generalized their learned tolerance across different juvenile individuals.
• This learning demonstrates an optimization of social tolerance based on information value.

Conclusions:

• Animals can learn to optimize social tolerance, particularly towards individuals providing valuable information.
• The ability to generalize learned tolerance may enhance adaptive responses to environmental changes.
• Learned social tolerance could explain the ecological success of species like jackdaws in human-altered landscapes.