When parental care is limited, songbirds learn more from their siblings than from their parents, as a group of researchers found through an experiment with European great tits described this Thursday in the journal Plos Biology.
Researchers at the University of California Davis and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, in Germanyamong them the Colombian scientist Gustavo Alarcon-Nieto, exposed 51 breeding pairs of this species and their 229 offspring, recently separated from their parents, to two feeding puzzles.
The game was solved by sliding a red door to the left or right to access some tasty worms that the great tits love.
“The fully automated puzzle boxes allowed us to collect high-resolution data on hundreds of microchipped birds, generating a large volume of information to unravel the learning pathways and decision-making strategies that juveniles employed during their transition to independence,” says one of the authors, Sonja Wild, of the University of California Davis.
Learning life skills
After observing the birds’ behavior for 10 weeks, Wild and the rest of the researchers discovered that the birds were more likely to learn to solve the puzzle if their parents were skilled at doing so.
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However, the young birds’ solving strategies were much more influenced by the way their siblings and other adults, who were not their parents, solved the puzzle. That would explain the behavioral similarities in bird families with limited parental input.
Of the group of birds that were quickest to learn from each sibling group, almost 75% learned from adults who were not their parents, while about 25% learned from their parents. Of the second smartest group, 94% of its members learned to solve their siblings’ puzzle.
The authors emphasize that these results provide an example of multigenerational knowledge transmission that does not necessarily pass from parents to children, highlighting the importance of siblings and flock mates in the learning process of great tits.
Beyond cultural heritage
“In many animal species, offspring depend on their parents to learn behaviors, a process called cultural inheritance that gives rise to behavioral similarities within family units,” explains Wild.
But certain songbirds, such as the great tit, “almost know nothing about life when they leave the nest after just ten days of parental care. They usually follow their parents and continue asking for food or shelter, but they gradually withdraw from the care, and the young have to quickly learn to take care of themselves,” he adds.
This work demonstrates that “in these cases of limited parental care, siblings can be key sources for learning new behaviors, which provides an alternative route to learning through cultural inheritance,” he concludes.