Department of Biology and Evolution, University of Nevada, Ecology Evolution and Conservation Biology Graduate Program, Reno, NV 89557, USA.
Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5C2.
Proc Biol Sci. 2023 Jul 12;290(2002):20230900. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.0900.
Social animals may use alternative strategies when foraging, with producer-scrounger being one stable dichotomy of strategies. While 'producers' search and discover new food sources, 'scroungers' obtain food discovered by producers. Previous work suggests that differences in cognitive abilities may influence tendencies toward being either a producer or a scrounger, but scrounging behaviour in the context of specialized cognitive abilities is less understood. We investigated whether food-caching mountain chickadees, which rely on spatial cognition to retrieve food caches, engage in scrounging when learning a spatial task. We analysed data from seven seasons of spatial cognition testing, using arrays of radio frequency identification-enabled bird feeders, to identify and quantify potential scrounging behaviour. Chickadees rarely engaged in scrounging, scrounging was not repeatable within individuals and nearly all scrounging events occurred before the bird learned the 'producer' strategy. Scrounging was less frequent in harsher winters, but adults scrounged more than juveniles, and birds at higher elevations scrounged more than chickadees at lower elevations. There was no clear association between spatial cognitive abilities and scrounging frequency. Overall, our study suggests that food-caching species with specialized spatial cognition do not use scrounging as a stable strategy when learning a spatial task, instead relying on learning abilities.
社会性动物在觅食时可能会采用替代策略，而生产者-觅食者是稳定的策略二分法之一。“生产者”搜索并发现新的食物来源，而“觅食者”则获取生产者发现的食物。先前的工作表明，认知能力的差异可能会影响成为生产者或觅食者的倾向，但在专门的认知能力背景下，觅食行为的了解较少。我们调查了是否依赖空间认知来检索食物藏点的储食山雀在学习空间任务时是否会出现觅食行为。我们使用射频识别启用的鸟食器阵列分析了七个季节的空间认知测试数据，以识别和量化潜在的觅食行为。山雀很少进行觅食，个体内部的觅食行为不可重复，几乎所有的觅食行为都发生在鸟类学会“生产者”策略之前。在更恶劣的冬季，觅食行为较少，但成年鸟比幼鸟觅食更多，海拔较高的鸟比海拔较低的鸟觅食更多。空间认知能力与觅食频率之间没有明显的关联。总的来说，我们的研究表明，具有专门空间认知能力的储食物种在学习空间任务时不会将觅食作为一种稳定的策略，而是依赖于学习能力。
