Experimental Examination of Factors that Affect Public Information Use by Starlings

Saint Louis University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

Understanding the behavior of animals often requires knowledge of how individuals make decisions. This requires understanding the kinds of information animals possess about their environment. The proposed research will study decision-making in socially feeding starlings by examining how individuals acquire and use information obtained from other foragers. This information is known as public information and its existence and use can provide an important benefit to individuals in social aggregations. This work will test hypotheses regarding factors that affect the use of public information and evaluate how individuals combine public information with their own personal sampling information to estimate the quality of food patches. There are three potential broader implications of the proposed work. First, public information use appears to be widespread in several different contexts, including foraging, mate choice, habitat selection, and sequential assessment of opponents. Thus, a better understanding of how individuals acquire and use public information should allows greater understanding of a potentially widespread general benefit of sociality. As such, it may provide insight into the evolution and maintenance of a variety of social systems. Second, this study will employ several undergraduate students and target those students from groups traditionally under-represented in science early in their academic careers. Early exposure to the process of scientific discovery may encourage such students to pursue careers in science. Third, starlings are agricultural pests in many regions of North America. Insight from this work regarding how starlings estimate the quality of food patches, derived from understanding the factors that affect the use of public information, have the potential to be incorporated into mitigation strategies in agricultural systems.