This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Close social relationships are known to contribute to the survival of many animals, including humans. Maintaining social bonds over time, however, can also require effort and sacrifices.
Researchers at the University of Exeter and Swansea University recently studied wild jackdaws, birds belonging to the crow family, to understand how social bonds influence how they search for and obtain food. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggest that close relationships can bring feeding advantages for jackdaws, even if remaining with a partner means waiting longer before they can feed. "We know that in many animal species, individuals with strong social relationships to others tend to live longer and have better reproductive outcomes, but it is not really clear why," Luca G.
Hahn, first author of the paper, told Phys.org. "We therefore set out to understand how exactly animals can benefit from their social relationships. One particularly important context for survival and reproduction is foraging.
We aimed to address this open question by studying how social relationships shape decisions and outcomes during foraging in jackdaws, a highly social member of the crow family." Hahn and his colleagues wanted to explore the possible benefits of social bonds for bird foraging, the process of searching for and obtaining food. To do this, they studied a population of color-ringed jackdaws living in Cornwall, in the United Kingdom, for two years. The term color-ringed means that the birds were fitted with lightweight and brightly colored plastic leg bands, which allow wildlife researchers to tell the birds apart or track specific individuals.
One of the colored rings placed on each jackdaw contained a miniature transponder chip, a small electronic device that allowed the team to identify birds visiting the feeding stations. "We provided feeding stations where only one bird could feed, while another bird could wait in line behind," explained Hahn. "This allowed us to measure who foraged together, how individuals coordinated their activities, and the extent to which birds tolerated or displaced each other.
Through this standardized setting, we could test whether jackdaws might benefit from the presence of social partners at patchy food resources." The team's observations showed that social relationships can influence the decisions of jackdaws while they are foraging. These decisions can, in turn, affect the birds' access to food and potentially information. "Jackdaws preferred to associate with bonded partners (mating partners and close relatives) and coordinated their activities with them," said Hahn.
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