124 research outputs found
Social influences on the food preferences of house mice (Mus musculus)
No full textIn a series of studies undertaken to determine the conditions under which naive house mice (observers) develop preferences for foods eaten by recently-fed conspecifics (demonstrators), we found that observer mice exhibited enhanced preference for a food following interaction with either a healthy or an ill recently-fed demonstrator that had eaten that food. We also found that house mice developed an enhanced preference for a food after exposure to an anesthetized conspecific demonstrator powdered with that food, but not after exposure to a cotton-batting, conspecific-sized surrogate powdered with the same food. Results of other studies have indicated that, for both rats and mice, the presence in a food of carbon disulfide (a substance found on the breath of rats) increases preference for a carbon-disulfide-contaminated food. taken together, the parallels between Norway rats and house mice in social learning processes suggest homologous rather than analogous systems of communication about distant foods in these two murid rodents
Geographic Variation in the Behavior of Wild Great Apes: Is It Really Cultural?
No full textOpinions about the importance of social learning of information or innovations among animals in nature vary dramatically. Dugatkin (2000, p. 200) sees culture everywhere: “The vast array of animal behaviors that are touched by the long fingers of culture continues to grow, and my guess is that we have seen only the tip of the iceberg,” and “cultural transmission and gene/culture interactions are serious, underestimated forces in evolutionary biology” (ibid., p. 28). De Waal (2001, p. 363) agrees: “The world is chock-full of feathered and furry animals that learn their life’s lessons, habits, and songs from one another.” Others are not convinced, arguing that social learning is invoked spuriously to explain patterns in nature, in particular among great apes and cetaceans, that are explained more parsimoniously by using developmental models that assume individual acquisition of behavior patterns often attributed to culture (Galef 1992, 2003a Heyes 1993; Tomasello 1994; Laland and Hoppitt 2003; Laland and Janik 2006)
Familiarity and relatedness: effects on social learning about foods by norway rats and mongolian gerbils.
No full textSocial Enhancement of Food Preferences in Norway Rats: A Brief Review11Some portions of this article have appeared previously in Galef, B. G., Jr. (1994). Olfactory communications about foods among rats: A review of recent findings. In B. G. Galef, Jr., M. Mainardi, and P. Valsecchi (Eds.), Behavioral Aspects of Feeding (pp. 83–102). Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers.
No full textMate Assessment and Non-Independent Mate Choice by Female Japanese Quail
No full textThe body of this thesis is comprised primarily of two published papers (Chapters 2 and 3) and a third paper (Chapter 5) accepted for publication. All three investigate the influence of social information on mate choice in female Japanese quail, Corturniz japonica. In Chapter 1, I review the theoretical and empirical literature on mate choice and eavesdropping that are relevant to the main topics with which this thesis is concerned. I demonstrate, in Chapter 2, that female Japanese quail use information garnered from video images of males interacting with other females when subsequently choosing between the live males that appeared in the videos. The results of this experiment provide evidence of the utility of a technique to investigate social influences on the behavior of Japanese quail, and possibly, other avian species as well. In Chapter 3, I show that females use social information acquired by observing inter-male aggression to select mates, and provide evidence that the threat of injury posed by aggressive males influences females to select less aggressive males as mates. In Chapter 4, I provide a control for the possibility that females were not actually choosing to stay near less aggressive males in the experiments described in Chapter 3, but were preferring locations where those males had been seen engaged in agnostic interaction. Finally, in Chapter 5, I examine the role of sexual experience in determining whether when selecting a mate female quail copy the mate choices of other females or attend to the relative aggressiveness displayed by males engaged in intra-sexual competition when selecting a mate. I report that prior sexual experience is necessary for females to avoid the more aggressive of two males but not for expression of mate-choice copying. Taken together, the results of Chapters 3, 4 and 5 are consistent with the hypothesis that the relative costs and benefits of associating with dominant and submissive males may determine which type of male females will prefer as a partner. The view that females should invariably prefer dominant males because such males are likely to be a source of superior genes or can provide females with greater resources considers only the benefits and not the potential costs to females of consorting with relatively aggressive males. In Chapter 6 I summarize the major findings of the thesis, and then briefly describe a failed experiment to determine whether the technique developed in Chapter 2 could be used to examine effects of female observation of inter-male aggression on subsequent mate choice in the absence of audience effects, and discuss the conflicting selection pressures that Japanese quail of either sex may face.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD
Social learning research outside the laboratory: How and why?
No full textSocial learning enables both human and nonhuman animals
to acquire information relevant to many biologically
important activities: foraging (Galef & Giraldeau, 2001;
Mesoudi & O’Brien, 2008), mate choice (Jones, De-
Bruine, Little, Burriss, & Feinberg, 2007; Laland, 1994;
White, 2004), conflict (Peake & McGregor, 2004), and
predator avoidance (Griffin, 2004). Although use of social
information is not inherently adaptive (Boyd & Richerson,
1985; Laland, 2004), its frequent roles in the development
in animals of both innovations (sensu Reader & Laland,
2003) and routine skills (Jaeggi et al., 2010; Krakauer,
2005), as well as its exceptional prevalence in human societies, suggest the importance of social information in
biological and cultural evolution
Investigations into stickleback social learning
No full textThe objective of the experiments contained within this thesis was to provide further
insight into the social learning capabilities of threespined sticklebacks and the factors affecting the transmission of information through populations.
There are a number of previous studies which provide evidence that both threespined
and ninespined sticklebacks possess the ability to learn socially under a range of
contexts, such as foraging, anti-predator behaviour, mate choice, and cooperation. The
studies presented in this thesis aim to extend this knowledge and shed light on the social learning processes used. Evidence was found to support previous opinion that threespined sticklebacks are capable of using a number of social learning processes, including local enhancement, stimulus enhancement, and the social enhancement of food preferences. However, therewas no evidence to suggest that either threespined or ninespined sticklebacks are capable of using the social learning process of delayed local enhancement under a shelter choice context, a process which both species have previously been shown to use under a foraging context. This thesis also explores the effect of the social network within shoals of threespined sticklebacks upon the transmission of novel foraging information. It was discovered that both prior association preferences and prior diet have an effect on the order in which individuals discover a novel foraging task
Neonatal testosterone treatment affects the paw elevation of the Mongolian gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus)
No full text The present thesis reports an experiment that investigated the phenomenon of asymmetric paw elevation in the tripedal stance of the Mongolian gerbil, and tested the Geschwind-Galaburda extra-genetic theory of human handedness. Neonate gerbils of both sexes were injected with testosterone propionate during the "critical" period of brain development. They were then assessed for asymmetry in eye opening, for anogenital distance, and for paw elevation and scent marking before and after puberty. Eye opening asymmetry was not affected by treatment. Paw elevation was affected by treatment, with treated gerbils of both sexes displaying more right elevations before and after puberty than untreated gerbils. Control females displayed systematic patterns in paw elevation before and after puberty. Adult gerbils in all conditions displayed more consistency in paw elevation than young gerbils. Anogenital distance was increased with treatment, but only in the females. Adult scent marking behavior was marginally reduced with treatment, but only in the males. Results are interpreted within the Geschwind-Galaburda theory of handedness, and the hormonal basis of paw elevation is discussed. ThesisMaster of Science (MSc
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