Individual Antipredator Responses Are Positively Correlated Across Cue Types in Free-Living Black-Capped Chickadees ().

Prey animals must accurately assess predation risk within their environment. To gather information about this risk, prey animals may personally sample the environment ("personal information") or observe the behavior of congeners ("social information"). Personal information is thought to be more accurate and reliable but may also require more time and energy to acquire. On the other hand, social information, such as alarm calls, tends to be less costly to obtain but may also be less reliable if congeners assess risk differently from one another, or if the information quickly becomes outdated. Theoretical models predict that individuals will differ in how they value personal versus social information. We used previously collected data from a marked population of black-capped chickadees () to test this prediction. Chickadees were exposed to three different predator cue types: a predator mount (personal information), conspecific mobbing calls (social information), and a combination of both (personal + social information) near feeders established on their territory. We recorded the time it took a chickadee to visit a feeder following cue exposure (i.e., latency to resume feeding) to evaluate individual differences in response to predator cues. Contrary to our prediction, we found no evidence that individuals differed in how they valued personal versus social information about predation risk. Instead, our results suggest that responses to predator cues are state-dependent, with some individuals consistently responding more strongly than others, regardless of cue type. We also found that when chickadees were exposed to a combination of social and personal predator cues, they exhibited higher among-individual variation in latency to resume feeding than when they were exposed to social or personal cues alone. We discuss how individual differences in cue integration (i.e., cue redundancy/equivalence, enhancement, and antagonism) may account for this finding.