Abstract: Abstract In foraging groups, individuals may utilise information from their social environment to aid decision making when choosing where to search for food. Little work has looked at the costs or benefits of behavioural differences, such as consistent individual variation in boldness, with respect to learning ability. Here, we investigate the response of three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) to ‘social cues’, ‘local enhancement’ and ‘public information’ during foraging tasks. Our results confirm previous work suggesting that this species responds to social cues and local enhancement but not public information. Variation in boldness did not affect the use of different types of information. However, time taken to make a choice and reach a patch varied between fish with different levels of boldness. Contrary to expectation, shy fish were the more variable individuals, having a greater range of reaction times when responding to the tasks. This suggests that individual behavioural differences still play a role when utilising information obtained from the environment and may influence the relative benefits that could result in different contexts.

Abstract: Antipredator vocalizations of social companions are important for facilitating long-term changes in the responses of prey to novel predator stimuli. However, dynamic variation in the time course of acoustic communication has important implications for learning of predator cues associated with auditory signals. While animals often experience acoustic signals simultaneously with predator cues, they may also at times experience signals and predator stimuli in succession. The ability to learn about stimuli that are perceived not only together, but also after, acoustic signals has the potential to expand the range of opportunities for learning about novel events. Earlier work in Indian mynahs (Acridotheres tristis) has revealed that subjects acquire a visual exploratory response to a novel avian mount after they have experienced it together with conspecific distress vocalizations, a call produced in response to seizure by a predator. The present study explored to what extent such learning occurred if the avian mount was experienced after, rather than simultaneously with, distress calls, such as might happen if call production is interrupted by prey death. Results showed that mynahs that experienced a novel avian mount simultaneously with the sound of distress calls exhibited a sustained exploratory response to the mount after training relative to before that was not apparent in birds that received distress calls and mount in succession. This finding suggests that vocal antipredator signals may only trigger learning of environmental stimuli with which they share some temporal overlap. Recipients may need to access complementary non-vocal cues from the prey victim to learn about predator stimuli that are perceived after vocal behaviour.

Abstract: nterest in personality is growing in a wide range of disciplines, but only in a few systems it is possible to assess the survival value of personality. Field studies looking at the relationship between personality and survival value early in life are greatly hampered by the fact that personality can at present only be assessed after individuals become independent from their parents. In passerines, for example, this is often after a period of intensive selection for the survival on fledglings. The main aim of this study is therefore to develop a method to measure personality before this period of selection. For this purpose, we developed the handling stress (HS) test. We measured HS in 14-d-old great tit nestlings by counting the number of breast movements (breath rate) in four subsequent 15-s bouts for 1 min; before and after they were socially isolated from their siblings for 15 min. To calculate the repeatability of HS, we repeated the test 6 mo later. To assess the relationship between HS and exploratory behaviour, we correlated the outcome of both tests. We ran tests both on birds of lines selected for extreme personality and on wild birds from a natural population. We found that birds selected for fast exploration reacted more to HS compared with birds selected for slow exploration and that HS was repeatable in different life phases. We confirmed this by finding an increase in the HS with increasing exploratory scores in wild birds. These results show that we can use the HS test as a measurement of personality, making it a potential tool for studying the relationship between personality and survival value early in life.

Abstract: Grooming might be a resource that is offered in exchange for some benefit (e.g. access to a feeding site or coalitionary support) or it might be a mechanism for building and servicing social relationships, whose function, in turn, is to facilitate the exchange of resources and services. Bi-directional (or simultaneous mutual) grooming is unusually common among chimpanzees (though rare in other primates) and we suggest that this might be because it is an especially strong indicator of social bonding. Because the bonding role of bi-directional grooming offers substantially different predictions from the interpretation offered by the models based on reciprocal altruism (RA), we use a critical tests methodology (i.e. tests that unequivocally support one hypothesis at the expense of the other) to differentiate between the bonding and RA hypotheses. We use data on the dynamics of grooming interactions from a captive group of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to show that dominant individuals tolerated the individuals with whom they performed bi-directional grooming more than they did those who typically provided them unidirectional grooming. Dominants rejected and terminated grooming sessions more often with the individuals who provided them with mostly unidirectional grooming than with those with whom they groomed bi-directionally. In addition, animals engaged in bi-directional grooming more often with both relatives and those with whom they were often in proximity. These results support the bonding model of mutually reciprocated grooming at the expense of the RA model, and suggest that, at least in chimpanzees, simultaneous mutual grooming may play a particularly important role in social bonding.

Abstract: Feral horses live in social systems similar to those of some species in which infant killing has been reported (e.g. lions), but such behaviour has been reported neither in horses nor in any other ungulate. The results of interviews with owners of free-ranging horses (Camargue breed) are given which show that, though rare, infant killing occurs in this breed, and that it seems to be confined to male foals. It is argued that the observed behaviour cannot simply be considered as pathological, and that close attention should be paid to the possibility that it occurs in wild and feral equids.