Social learning about dangerous people by wild jackdaws - PubMed (original) (raw)

. 2019 Sep 25;6(9):191031.

doi: 10.1098/rsos.191031. eCollection 2019 Sep.

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Social learning about dangerous people by wild jackdaws

Victoria E Lee et al. R Soc Open Sci. 2019.

Abstract

For animals that live alongside humans, people can present both an opportunity and a threat. Previous studies have shown that several species can learn to discriminate between individual people and assess risk based on prior experience. To avoid potentially costly encounters, it may also pay individuals to learn about dangerous people based on information from others. Social learning about anthropogenic threats is likely to be beneficial in habitats dominated by human activity, but experimental evidence is limited. Here, we tested whether wild jackdaws (Corvus monedula) use social learning to recognize dangerous people. Using a within-subjects design, we presented breeding jackdaws with an unfamiliar person near their nest, combined with conspecific alarm calls. Subjects that heard alarm calls showed a heightened fear response in subsequent encounters with the person compared to a control group, reducing their latency to return to the nest. This study provides important evidence that animals use social learning to assess the level of risk posed by individual humans.

Keywords: cognition; corvid; fear learning; human-wildlife conflict; social learning; urban ecology.

© 2019 The Authors.

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Conflict of interest statement

We declare we have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Experimental design and predictions. Focal birds received three stimulus presentations at their nest-box (baseline, training and test phase). In the training phase, subjects were presented with playbacks from one of four treatments (scold call/familiar; scold call/unfamiliar; contact call/familiar; contact call/unfamiliar). If jackdaws learn socially about dangerous people, we expected birds to increase their fear response to the human following association with scold calls (denoted by exclamation marks). If jackdaws engage in directed social learning in this context, we predicted that the strength of the effect would be greater for birds that heard familiar scold calls in the training (denoted by two exclamation marks).

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Time taken by females to land on the nest-box following their return to the area. Females that heard scold call playbacks in trial (ii) (training phase) were quicker to approach the nest in the test phase (trial (iii)) compared to their baseline (trial (i)). Females that heard contact call playbacks in the training phase took longer to approach the nest on their first visit in the test phase (trial (iii)) compared to their baseline (trial (i)). Points and whiskers denote mean and standard error, n = 42 observations of 21 females.

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