Abstract
Phenotypic variation may influence social structure if animals associate nonrandomly based on phenotypic traits. For animals that rely on cognition for survival, variation in cognitive ability may also affect social structure. Individuals with worse cognitive abilities could benefit from preferentially associating with conspecifics with better cognition, from being more gregarious, or both, allowing them access to resources. Climatic conditions influence resource availability, which may also affect the relative benefits of assortment or gregariousness, resulting in spatiotemporal variation of social patterns. Using 5 years of data, we investigated assortment by spatial cognitive ability and associations between sociality and spatial cognition in food-caching mountain chickadees, Poecile gambeli, inhabiting harsher environments at higher elevations and milder environments at lower elevations. Elevation environments differ in overwinter severity and in the harshest winter, high elevation chickadees with better spatial learning and memory abilities were less gregarious and showed lower social differentiation (or choosiness) than those with worse spatial learning and memory abilities but did not assort based on these traits. In two other seasons, including the second harshest winter, high elevation chickadees that were less cognitively flexible showed more social differentiation than those that were more cognitively flexible. In these two seasons alone, chickadees negatively assorted by spatial learning and memory performance. Chickadees from low elevations only demonstrated negative assortment in the second harshest winter. All other results were nonsignificant, suggesting that overall, individual spatial cognitive abilities or those of their associates have little influence on social preferences.
Significance statement
We showed that under certain environmental conditions, social behavior may be related to spatial cognitive abilities in mountain chickadees that rely heavily on spatial cognition for overwinter survival, but that overall, cognition does not appear to influence social behavior. In the few years that patterns were present, they fit three trends: 1) chickadees with worse spatial cognitive abilities were more gregarious; 2) chickadees with worse spatial cognitive abilities were choosier; and/or 3) chickadees had stronger associations with social partners that had spatial cognitive abilities that differed from their own and weaker associations with those of similar cognitive abilities. While it is unclear under which specific circumstances these patterns emerge, they coincided with extreme snowfall, suggesting that individuals with worse spatial cognition alter their social behavior to buffer against their relatively greater risk of starvation under extenuating circumstances.
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Data Availability
All data used in analyses presented here are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/apitera/MOCHCognitionSociality.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Rebecca Croston for her work collecting data in 2015-16, Maria Tello-Ramos for her work collecting data in 2016-17, Dovid Kozlovsky for his work collecting data 2015-2017, and the staff of University of California Berkeley Sagehen Creek Field Station. We thank Elizabeth Leger, Jenny Ouyang, and Thomas Parchman as well as Eva Serrano Davies and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that greatly improved the quality of this manuscript.
Code availability
R code used in these analyses is available on GitHub at https://github.com/apitera/MOCHCognitionSociality.
Funding
AMP was supported by a Graduate Student Research Grant by the University of Nevada, Reno Graduate Student Association. BRS was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) 2019287870, LMB was supported by NSF GRFP 2020305313, and CLB was supported by the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant 1600845. VVP was supported by NSF grant IOS1856181 and IOS2119824 and ESB was supported by DBI 1556313.
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AMP and VVP designed the experiment and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. AMP analyzed all data. All authors participated in data collection and contributed to writing the finalized version of the manuscript.
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This study was done in accordance with the University of Nevada, Reno Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (protocol no. 20-11-1103, 20-06-1014, and 20-08-1062) and local and federal guidelines (California Fish and Wildlife Permit S-193630001-20007-001). We released all birds immediately after banding, handled them as little as possible and only when necessary, and ensured that they showed no evidence of detrimental effects of banding or monitoring.
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Appendix
Snow depth over time for dates in which network data were used. For reference, day 1 is 1 October, day 93 is 1 January and day 180 is 28 March in 2015-16 and 2019-20 and 29 March in all other seasons. Open diamonds and dashed lines reflect data from the low elevation site and filled diamonds and solid lines reflect data from the high elevation site. The dotted grey line shows 1 m snow depth for reference
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Pitera, A., Heinen, V., Welklin, J. et al. Spatiotemporal variation in cognitive phenotype, social network position, and distribution of social associations in a food-caching bird. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 78, 50 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-024-03466-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-024-03466-3