Seasonal variation in male-female competition, cooperation and selfish hoarding in a monogamous songbird

Repeatability and heritability of inhibitory control performance in wild toutouwai (Petroica longipes)

Despite increasing interest in the evolution of inhibitory control, few studies have examined the validity of widespread testing paradigms, the long-term repeatability and the heritability of this cognitive ability in the wild. We investigated these aspects in the inhibitory control performance of wild toutouwai (North Island robin; Petroica longipes), using detour and reversal learning tasks. We assessed convergent validity by testing whether individual performance correlated across detour and reversal learning tasks. We then further evaluated task validity by examining whether individual performance was confounded by non-cognitive factors. We tested a subset of subjects twice in each task to estimate the repeatability of performance across a 1-year period. Finally, we used a population pedigree to estimate the heritability of task performance. Individual performance was unrelated across detour and reversal learning tasks, indicating that these measured different cognitive abilities. Task performance was not influenced by body condition, boldness or prior experience, and showed moderate between-year repeatability. Yet despite this individual consistency, we found no evidence that task performance was heritable. Our findings suggest that detour and reversal learning tasks measure consistent individual differences in distinct forms of inhibitory control in toutouwai, but this variation may be environmentally determined rather than genetic.

Expanding the frame around social dynamics and glucocorticoids: From hierarchies within the nest to competitive interactions among species

The effect of the social environment on individual state or condition has largely focused on glucocorticoid levels (GCs). As metabolic hormones whose production can be influenced by nutritional, physical, or psychosocial stressors, GCs are a valuable (though singular) measure that may reflect the degree of "stress" experienced by an individual. Most work to date has focused on how social rank influences GCs in group-living species or how predation risk influences GCs in prey. This work has been revealing, but a more comprehensive assessment of the social environment is needed to fully understand how different features of the social environment influence GCs in both group living and non-group living species and across life history stages. Just as there can be intense within-group competition among adult conspecifics, it bears appreciating there can also be competition among siblings from the same brood, among adult conspecifics that do not live in groups, or among heterospecifics. In these situations, dominance hierarchies typically emerge, albeit, do dominants or subordinate individuals or species have higher GCs? We examine the degree of support for hypotheses derived from group-living species about whether differential GCs between dominants and subordinates reflect the "stress of subordination" or "costs of dominance" in these other social contexts. By doing so, we aim to test the generality of these two hypotheses and propose new research directions to broaden the lens that focuses on social hierarchies and GCs.

Animal Cognition: The Benefits of Remembering

How cognitive abilities evolve through natural selection is poorly understood. Two new studies show that a good spatial memory helps birds that hide their food to survive and produce more offspring.

Male New Zealand robins (Petroica longipes) cater to their mate's desire when sharing food in the wild

In many species that have bi-parental care, food-sharing males provide vital nutritional resources to their mates during reproduction. However, it is currently unknown whether females can signal specific desires to their mates, or if males can cater to female desire in the wild. Here we investigate whether and how wild male North Island robins (Petroica longipes) respond to changes in their mates' desires and nutritional need when sharing food. We demonstrate that wild female robins' desire for particular foods changes over short time periods; when given the choice between two types of insect larvae, females prefer the type they have not recently eaten. In our experiments, wild male robins preferentially shared the larvae type that their mate was most likely to desire and also increased the quantity of food shared if she had begun incubating. Males catered to their mates' desire when female behaviour was the only cue available to guide their choices. This is the first evidence that females may behaviourally communicate their specific food desires to their mates, enabling males to cater to fine-scale changes in their mates' nutritional requirements in the wild. Such a simple behaviour-reading mechanism has the potential to be widespread among other food-sharing species.

Caching in the presence of competitors: Are Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) sensitive to audience attentiveness?

When social animals cache food close to their burrow, the potential for an audience member to observe the event is significantly increased. As a consequence, in order to reduce theft it may be advantageous for animals to be sensitive to certain audience cues, such as whether they are attentive or not to the cache event. In this study, observations were made on three groups of Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) in their natural habitat when they cached provisioned food items. When individuals cached within 10 m of conspecifics, we recorded the attentiveness (i.e. whether any audience members were orientated towards the cacher, had direct line of site and were not engaged in other activities) and identity of audience members. Overall, there was a preference to cache when audience members were inattentive rather than attentive. Additionally, we found rank effects related to cache avoidance whereby high-ranked individuals showed less avoidance to cache when audience members were attentive compared to medium- and low-ranked individuals. We suggest this audience sensitivity may have evolved in response to the difference in competitive ability amongst the ranks in how successful individuals are at winning foraging competitions. This study demonstrates that Cape ground squirrels have the ability to not only monitor the presence or absence of conspecifics but also discriminate individuals on the basis of their attentive state.

Hoarding without reward: rodent responses to repeated episodes of complete cache loss

For food-hoarding strategies to be maintained in a population, the benefits of hoarding must outweigh the costs. If rewards are too low to offset the costs of hoarding, hoarders might be expected to abandon hoarding and/or shift to an alternative storing strategy (e.g., increase food consumption). However the ability to adjust to such circumstances requires that animals anticipate long-term rewards and adjust storing strategies to modify future outcomes. To test this, we subjected three sympatric food-hoarding species (the Korean field mouse, Apodemus peninsulae, both a scatter and larder hoarder; the Chinese white-bellied rat, Niviventer confucianus, only a larder hoarder; and Père David's rock squirrel, Sciurotamias davidianus, predominantly a scatter hoarder) to repeated episodes of complete cache loss over nine sequential trials in semi-natural enclosures. Although these species increased harvest and consumption rates throughout the experiment, none of these three species ceased hoarding under these conditions. The variation in responses observed across species and gender suggest some degree of behavioural plasticity to compensate for such extreme losses, but a general inability to abandon hoarding or shift to an alternative strategy. Future studies should consider how such responses correspond to natural patterns of intensive pilferage in the field.

Adaptive numerical competency in a food-hoarding songbird

Most animals can distinguish between small quantities (less than four) innately. Many animals can also distinguish between larger quantities after extensive training. However, the adaptive significance of numerical discriminations in wild animals is almost completely unknown. We conducted a series of experiments to test whether a food-hoarding songbird, the New Zealand robin Petroica australis, uses numerical judgements when retrieving and pilfering cached food. Different numbers of mealworms were presented sequentially to wild birds in a pair of artificial cache sites, which were then obscured from view. Robins frequently chose the site containing more prey, and the accuracy of their number discriminations declined linearly with the total number of prey concealed, rising above-chance expectations in trials containing up to 12 prey items. A series of complementary experiments showed that these results could not be explained by time, volume, orientation, order or sensory confounds. Lastly, a violation of expectancy experiment, in which birds were allowed to retrieve a fraction of the prey they were originally offered, showed that birds searched for longer when they expected to retrieve more prey. Overall results indicate that New Zealand robins use a sophisticated numerical sense to retrieve and pilfer stored food, thus providing a critical link in understanding the evolution of numerical competency.