McMahon, Keith, Marples, Nicola M, Spurgin, Lewis G, Rowland, Hannah M 
ORCID: 0000-0002-1040-555X, Sheldon, Ben C and Firth, Josh A ORCID: 0000-0001-7183-4115
(2023)
Social network centrality predicts dietary decisions in a wild bird population.
[Preprint]
Abstract
<jats:title>SUMMARY</jats:title><jats:p>How individuals balance costs and benefits of group living remains central to understanding sociality. In relation to diet, social foraging provides many advantages but also increases competition. Nevertheless, social individuals may offset increased competition by broadening their diet and consuming novel foods. Despite the expected relationships between social behaviour and dietary decisions, how sociality shapes individuals’ novel food consumption remains largely untested in natural populations. Here, we use wild, RFID-tracked, great tits to experimentally test how sociality predicts dietary decisions. We show that individuals with more social connections have higher propensity to use novel foods compared to socially-peripheral individuals, and this is unrelated to neophobia, observations, and demographic factors. These findings indicate sociable individuals may offset potential costs of competition by foraging more broadly. We discuss how social environments may drive behavioural change in natural populations, and the implications for the causes and consequences of social strategies and dietary decisions.</jats:p>
| Item Type: | Preprint |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Behavioral and Social Science, Nutrition |
| Divisions: | Faculty of Health and Life Sciences Faculty of Health and Life Sciences > Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Sep 2023 08:36 |
| Last Modified: | 11 Apr 2024 16:30 |
| DOI: | 10.1101/2023.08.25.554636 |
| Open Access URL: | https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.25... |
| Related URLs: | |
| URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3172721 |
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