The ability of North Island Robins to discriminate between humans is related to their behavioural type - PubMed (original) (raw)

Craig Barnett et al. PLoS One. 2013.

Abstract

Animals are able to learn to identify persistent threats to themselves and their offspring. For example, birds are able to quickly learn to discriminate between humans that have previously threatened their nests from humans with whom they have had no prior experience. However, no study has yet examined whether a bird's ability to discriminate between humans is related to the bird's underlying behavioural type. In this study, we examined whether there were differences among North Island (NI) robins (Petroica longipes), based on their underlying behavioural type, in their abilities to discriminate between familiar and novel human observers. Using a simple feeding experiment, we timed how long it took birds to attack a food item placed next to an observer on each of 7 days. On the eighth day, a different observer timed the birds. We found that birds could be split into two behaviour types based on their attack behaviour: fast attackers (latencies <20 sec) and slow attackers (latencies >20 secs). Interestingly, the fast birds did not increase their attack latency in response to the novel observer whereas the slow attackers did. This result, for the first time, demonstrates that a bird's ability to discriminate between humans can vary among birds based on their behavioural type.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1. The median latencies over the course of the 8 days of the experiment for slow birds (solid line and filled symbol) and fast birds (hashed line and unfilled symbol).

The bars represent the 10th and 90th percentiles. It is interesting to note that the latencies for the fast birds reach an asymptote on day 2 whereas slow birds reach their asymptote on day 3 of the experiment.

Figure 2

Figure 2. The median difference in the latency to attack prey for the novel person (day 8) minus latency for the last day familiar person (day 7) for fast and slow birds.

Positive values indicate that birds took longer to attack prey when the novel observer was timing the birds compared with a familiar observer. The box indicates the first and third quartiles whilst the bars indicate the 10th and 90th percentiles.

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Grants and funding

This research was partially funded by the School of Biological Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. No additional external funding was received for this study.

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