Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 66, Issue 4, October 2003, Pages 729-739
Animal Behaviour

Regular Articles
Social learning of foraging sites and escape routes in wild Trinidadian guppies

https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.2003.2252Get rights and content

Abstract

We describe two field experiments with wild guppies, Poecilia reticulata, in Trinidad that demonstrated that guppies can acquire foraging and predator escape-response information from conspecifics. In the foraging experiment, subjects were presented with two distinctly marked feeders in their home rivers. One feeder contained a conspecific shoal in a transparent container. Guppies preferred to enter the feeder containing this artificial shoal over the other feeder. In a test phase, the artificial shoal was removed and the feeders replaced at the testing site after a 5-min delay. More guppies entered the feeder that had contained the artificial shoal over the other feeder, a difference that can be explained only by the fish learning the characteristics or location of the feeder during the training phase. We suggest that subjects acquired a foraging patch preference through a propensity to approach feeding conspecifics, a local enhancement process. In the predator escape-response experiment, naıve ‘observer’ guppies could avoid an approaching trawl net by escaping through either a hole to which ‘demonstrator’ guppies had been trained or through an alternative hole. When the demonstrators were present, the naıve observers escaped more often and more rapidly by the demonstrated route than the alternative route. When the demonstrators were removed, observers maintained a route preference according to the training of their demonstrators, which suggests that the observers had learned an escape route through following or observing their more knowledgeable conspecifics. Thus, both experiments reveal that guppies can socially learn in the wild. Copyright 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. 

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  • Cited by (0)

    f1

    Correspondence and present address: S. M. Reader, Utrecht University, Behavioural Biology, Padualaan 14, P.O. Box 80086, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands (email: [email protected]).

    f2

    J. R. Kendal is now at the Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, U.S.A.

    f3

    K. N. Laland is now at the School of Biology, University of St Andrews, Bute Medical Building, Queen's Terrace, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland KY16 9TS, U.K.

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