If Birds Had Facebook, What Would Their Social Networks Look Like?

Researchers have analyzed the social networks that link individual birds to each other – a kind of ‘Facebook for birds’.

Asian Scientist (Sep. 18, 2013) – Researchers in Australia and the UK have analyzed the social networks that link individual birds to each other – a kind of ‘Facebook for birds’ – to reveal how differences between individuals underpin the way social interactions occur across populations.

Through their analysis, published in Ecology Letters, the researchers found that male birds that exhibit ‘shy’ social behavior are much more likely to join flocks of birds with a similar personality than their ‘bold’ male counterparts. However, shy birds also have fewer social partners than bold birds.

The study of great tits (Parus major) in Wytham Woods, near Oxford (UK), also found that shy male and female birds don’t interact with as many different individuals as bold males or females, and that shy males and females tend to have more stable relationships than bold ones – being seen with the same individuals more often over time.

“There has been a lot of work describing the range of individual personalities in the great tit,” said Lucy Aplin, the first author of the report.

“Now we are linking it to the social networks and social organisation of the species, which hasn’t been done before.”

The work is part of a long-term project that involves tracking thousands of wild birds in Wytham Woods fitted with tiny RFID tags that can be detected by sensors on 65 feeding stations.

The researchers used records of the millions of feeder visits made by birds over an entire winter to reconstruct the social network – the pattern of with whom an individual interacts and how often – across an entire population.

Aplin was part of an international research team that rated great tits on a personality axis ranging from shy to bold. Researchers tested the personality of the birds by introducing them to new environments and seeing how they would react – typically ‘shy’ birds would explore the strange environment very slowly whereas ‘bold’ ones moved quickly to explore it.

The tests were repeated over time and the responses of individuals proved to be, surprisingly, very consistent so that they could be attributed a personality somewhere along the shy/bold spectrum.

The team tracked how they interacted with other birds to determine how their personality influenced social behavior. Bold birds went for quantity over quality in their relationships, having weaker associations with more birds and foraging with several different groups.

“Measuring the social networks we could see that bolder birds tended to hop between foraging flocks and have short term foraging associations, while shy birds tended to maintain a foraging association over a long time,” said Aplin.

“Shy birds are following a social strategy where they maintain a few strong and stable social associations to minimize risk. Hopping between many flocks may increase risks for bolder birds, but might maximize rewards through improving their social position and giving them better access to information, such as the location of food.”

The research team found that similar birds – ‘birds of a feather’ – do indeed flock together, finding shy males most often associated with similar personalities.

“We think shy male birds might group together to avoid the more aggressive bold birds,” said Aplin, who went on to explain that females associate freely with all personalities.

The article can be found at: Aplin et al. (2013) Individual Personalities Predict Social Behavior In Wild Networks Of Great Tits (Parus Major).

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Source: Oxford University; Photo: Stefan Berndtsson/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

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