Bapat Awani, Kempf Anna E, Friry Salomé, Boucherie Palmyre H, Bugnyar Thomas
Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Djerassiplatz 1, 1030, Vienna, Austria.
Konrad Lorenz Research Center for Behavior and Cognition, Grünau im Almtal, Core facility of the University of Vienna, Fischerau 13, 4645, Grünau im Almtal, Austria.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 2;15(1):137. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-83856-9.
Object play has been proposed to provide individuals with information about their environment, facilitating foraging skills and tool use. In species where object play co-occurs with locomotor or social play, it may have additional functional implications, such as facilitating the evaluation of peers or forming social bonds. For instance, ravens judge others' competitiveness via play caching and engage in social play by exchanging objects. However, most raven studies were conducted on a restricted number of individuals and under controlled captive settings. To validate these findings and to gauge the functional scope of object play under field conditions, we investigated the patterns and characteristics of object play in individually marked free-flying ravens in the Austrian Alps. Using two large data sets, we show a decrease in object play with age and a preference for playing longer with novel objects, supporting findings from captivity. We also find adults occasionally playing with objects and no difference in the duration of social or non-social object play bouts across age classes. Taken together, our findings are in line with the assumption that raven object play likely has more than one function and serves to gain information about the individual's physical and social environment.
物体玩耍被认为能为个体提供有关其环境的信息，促进觅食技能和工具使用。在物体玩耍与运动或社交玩耍同时出现的物种中，它可能还有其他功能意义，比如有助于评估同伴或形成社会纽带。例如，渡鸦通过玩耍贮藏来判断其他渡鸦的竞争力，并通过交换物体进行社交玩耍。然而，大多数关于渡鸦的研究是在数量有限的个体上以及在受控的圈养环境中进行的。为了验证这些发现并衡量野外条件下物体玩耍的功能范围，我们调查了奥地利阿尔卑斯山单独标记的自由飞行渡鸦的物体玩耍模式和特征。利用两个大型数据集，我们发现物体玩耍随着年龄增长而减少，并且渡鸦更喜欢与新物体玩耍更长时间，这支持了圈养研究的结果。我们还发现成年渡鸦偶尔会玩物体，并且不同年龄组的社交或非社交物体玩耍回合的持续时间没有差异。综合来看，我们的发现符合这样一种假设，即渡鸦的物体玩耍可能具有不止一种功能，并且有助于获取有关个体物理和社会环境的信息。
