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Experimental resource pulses influence social-network dynamics and the potential for information flow in tool-using crows.

ABSTRACT: Social-network dynamics have profound consequences for biological processes such as information flow, but are notoriously difficult to measure in the wild. We used novel transceiver technology to chart association patterns across 19 days in a wild population of the New Caledonian crow--a tool-using species that may socially learn, and culturally accumulate, tool-related information. To examine the causes and consequences of changing network topology, we manipulated the environmental availability of the crows' preferred tool-extracted prey, and simulated, in silico, the diffusion of information across field-recorded time-ordered networks. Here we show that network structure responds quickly to environmental change and that novel information can potentially spread rapidly within multi-family communities, especially when tool-use opportunities are plentiful. At the same time, we report surprisingly limited social contact between neighbouring crow communities. Such scale dependence in information-flow dynamics is likely to influence the evolution and maintenance of material cultures.

SUBMITTER: St Clair JJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4659832 | biostudies-other | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Experimental resource pulses influence social-network dynamics and the potential for information flow in tool-using crows.

St Clair James J H JJH Burns Zackory T ZT Bettaney Elaine M EM Morrissey Michael B MB Otis Brian B Ryder Thomas B TB Fleischer Robert C RC James Richard R Rutz Christian C

Nature communications 20151103

Social-network dynamics have profound consequences for biological processes such as information flow, but are notoriously difficult to measure in the wild. We used novel transceiver technology to chart association patterns across 19 days in a wild population of the New Caledonian crow--a tool-using species that may socially learn, and culturally accumulate, tool-related information. To examine the causes and consequences of changing network topology, we manipulated the environmental availability ...[more]

PMID: 26529116

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Project description:Social interactions drive many important ecological and evolutionary processes. It is therefore essential to understand the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that underlie social patterns. A central tenet of the field of behavioural ecology is the expectation that the distribution of resources shapes patterns of social interactions. We combined experimental manipulations with social network analyses to ask how patterns of resource distribution influence complex social interactions. We experimentally manipulated the distribution of an essential food and reproductive resource in semi-natural populations of forked fungus beetles Bolitotherus cornutus. We aggregated resources into discrete clumps in half of the populations and evenly dispersed resources in the other half. We then observed social interactions between individually marked beetles. Half-way through the experiment, we reversed the resource distribution in each population, allowing us to control any demographic or behavioural differences between our experimental populations. At the end of the experiment, we compared individual and group social network characteristics between the two resource distribution treatments. We found a statistically significant but quantitatively small effect of resource distribution on individual social network position and detected no effect on group social network structure. Individual connectivity (individual strength) and individual cliquishness (local clustering coefficient) increased in environments with clumped resources, but this difference explained very little of the variance in individual social network position. Individual centrality (individual betweenness) and measures of overall social structure (network density, average shortest path length and global clustering coefficient) did not differ between environments with dramatically different distributions of resources. Our results illustrate that the resource environment, despite being fundamental to our understanding of social systems, does not always play a central role in shaping social interactions. Instead, our results suggest that sex differences and temporally fluctuating environmental conditions may be more important in determining patterns of social interactions.

Dataset Information

Experimental resource pulses influence social-network dynamics and the potential for information flow in tool-using crows.

Publications

Experimental resource pulses influence social-network dynamics and the potential for information flow in tool-using crows.

Similar Datasets

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