Wild jackdaws respond to their partner's distress, but not with consolation.

ABSTRACT: Individuals are expected to manage their social relationships to maximize fitness returns. For example, reports of some mammals and birds offering unsolicited affiliation to distressed social partners (commonly termed 'consolation') are argued to illustrate convergent evolution of prosocial traits across divergent taxa. However, most studies cannot discriminate between consolation and alternative explanations such as self-soothing. Crucially, no study that controls for key confounds has examined consolation in the wild, where individuals face more complex and dangerous environments than in captivity. Controlling for common confounds, we find that male jackdaws (Corvus monedula) respond to their mate's stress-states, but not with consolation. Instead, they tended to decrease affiliat

SUBMITTER: Hooper R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8242836 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature