Social network centrality predicts dietary decisions in a wild bird population.

ABSTRACT: How individuals balance costs and benefits of group living remains central to understanding sociality. In relation to diet, social foraging provides many advantages but also increases competition. Nevertheless, social individuals may offset increased competition by broadening their diet and consuming novel foods. Despite the expected relationships between social behavior and dietary decisions, how sociality shapes individuals' novel food consumption remains largely untested in natural populations. Here, we use wild great tits to experimentally test how sociality predicts dietary decisions. We show that individuals with more social connections have higher propensity to use novel foods compared to socially peripheral individuals, and this is unrelated to neophobia, observations, and demograp

SUBMITTER: McMahon K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11024920 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature