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Behavioural traits modulate the use of heterospecific social information for nest site selection: experimental evidence from a wild bird population.

ABSTRACT: The use of social information for making decisions is common but can be constrained by behavioural traits via, for example, the ability to gather information. Such constrained information use has been described in foraging habitat selection; yet it remains unexplored in the breeding habitat selection context, despite potentially strong fitness consequences. We experimentally tested whether three behavioural traits (aggressiveness, boldness and neophobia) affected the use of heterospecific social information for nest site selection in wild collared flycatchers Ficedula albicollis. Flycatchers have previously been found to copy or reject an artificial apparent preference of tits (their main competitors) for a nest site feature: they preferred nest-boxes with the same or a different feature, depending on tit early reproductive investment. Here, we confirmed this result and showed that shy individuals and less aggressive old males (i.e. 2 years old or older) copied tit apparent preference, while more aggressive old males rejected the tit preference. Aggressiveness and boldness may allow males to access more information sources or affect males' interactions with dominant tits when selecting a nest site. Our study highlights the links between variation in behaviours and social information use for breeding habitat selection and calls for further work to explore underlying mechanisms.

SUBMITTER: Morinay J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7211437 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Artificial selection experiments are a powerful tool in evolutionary biology. Selecting individuals based on multimarker genotypes (genomic selection) has several advantages over phenotype-based selection but has, so far, seen very limited use outside animal and plant breeding. Genomic selection depends on the markers tagging the causal loci that underlie the selected trait. Because the number of necessary markers depends, among other factors, on effective population size, genomic selection may be in practice not feasible in wild populations as most wild populations have much higher effective population sizes than domesticated populations. However, the current possibilities of cost-effective high-throughput genotyping could overcome this limitation and thereby make it possible to apply genomic selection also in wild populations. Using a unique dataset of about 2000 wild great tits (Parus major), a small passerine bird, genotyped on a 650 k SNP chip we calculated genomic breeding values for egg-laying date using the so-called GBLUP approach. In this approach, the pedigree-based relatedness matrix of an "animal model," a special form of the mixed model, is replaced by a marker-based relatedness matrix. Using the marker-based relatedness matrix, the model seemed better able to disentangle genetic and permanent environmental effects. We calculated the accuracy of genomic breeding values by correlating them to the phenotypes of individuals whose phenotypes were excluded from the analysis when estimating the genomic breeding values. The obtained accuracy was about 0.20, with very little effect of the used genomic relatedness estimator but a strong effect of the number of SNPs. The obtained accuracy is lower than typically seen in domesticated species but considerable for a trait with low heritability (∼0.2) as avian breeding time. Our results show that genomic selection is possible also in wild populations with potentially many applications, which we discuss here.

Project description:In birds and mammals, mobbing calls constitute an important form of social information that can attract numerous sympatric species to localized mobbing aggregations. While such a response is thought to reduce the future predation risk for responding species, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. One way to test the link between predation risk reduction and mobbing attraction involves testing the relationship between species' attraction to mobbing calls and the functional traits that define their vulnerability to predation risk. Two important traits known to influence prey vulnerability include relative prey-to-predator body size ratio and the overlap in space use between predator and prey; in combination, these measures strongly influence prey accessibility, and therefore their vulnerability, to predators. Here, we combine community surveys with behavioral experiments of a diverse bird assemblage in the lowland rainforest of Sumatra to test whether the functional traits of body mass (representing body size) and foraging height (representing space use) can predict species' attraction to heterospecific mobbing calls. At four forest sites along a gradient of forest degradation, we characterized the resident bird communities using point count and mist-netting surveys, and determined the species groups attracted to standardized playbacks of mobbing calls produced by five resident bird species of roughly similar body size and foraging height. We found that (1) a large, diverse subcommunity of bird species was attracted to the mobbing calls and (2) responding species (especially the most vigorous respondents) tended to be (a) small (b) mid-storey foragers (c) with similar trait values as the species producing the mobbing calls. Our findings from the relatively lesser known bird assemblages of tropical Asia add to the growing evidence for the ubiquity of heterospecific information networks in animal communities, and provide empirical support for the long-standing hypothesis that predation risk reduction is a major benefit of mobbing information networks.

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Behavioural traits modulate the use of heterospecific social information for nest site selection: experimental evidence from a wild bird population.

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