2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
One of the research participants during the assignment
American biologists have found that adult coyotes can learn to perform new tasks from their relatives. At the same time, the ability for such social learning depends on whether coyotes can observe skillful individuals directly, and their success in completing the task and whether they will be afraid of the new depend on this. The article was published in PLoS One.
Social learning is one of the most common developmental strategies for animals living in groups. Not only younger individuals can learn (by observing the older ones): often knowledge and skills are transferred between already adult individuals, and in particular - from the dominant individual to others lower in the hierarchy. With such training, many different factors can affect its success, in addition to the place in the hierarchy, it can also be the sex and age of the individual, the characteristics of the behavior of the species (for example, widespread neophobia - fear of everything new) and the importance of receiving the reward for which the training is directed (for example, in a situation of obtaining food with the help of tools with a strong limited resources).
Scientists led by Julie Young of the USDA's Wildlife Research Center decided to study the factors that influence the social learning of coyotes (Canis latrans). Coyotes are animals that adapt well to new conditions, capable of finding food with limited resources, even despite their obvious neophobia.
As part of the study, scientists conducted three experiments. In the first, they examined whether coyotes are capable of social learning. To do this, they taught two coyotes to get food out of a box with a door with magnets: in order to get food, the door had to be opened by pulling the handle. After that, the coyotes, taking food from the closed box, were shown to five other coyotes. As a control condition, five more coyotes watched as two coyotes retrieved food from an open box without a door. To test the animals' ability to socially learn, two groups of observer coyotes (active experimental and control) were allowed to enter the boxes with the treats inside the closed doors.
Of all the coyotes that watched their relatives opening the box with a door, four individuals managed to successfully get the treat after the very first observation, and on the second day of observation, all five coped with the task: for this, the animals took about 15 minutes on average (the task was considered a failed failure within the first half hour). Animals from the control group spent more than an hour on solving the problem, and of all the control observers, only one coyote was able to open the box: he coped with the task only on the fourth day.
The second experiment involved 12 pairs of coyotes (each one a female and a male). The conditions and task of this experiment were similar to the first experiment: each pair had a trained coyote and an observer coyote, and they were also divided into an active experimental group (eight pairs) and a control group (four pairs). Instead of a box with a magnetic door, in this experiment, the scientists used a rubber tire lying on the ground and covered with a plastic sheet with two rope handles: the treat that needed to be obtained was under the sheet inside the tire and was buried shallowly in the ground. Trained coyotes and observers were together.
Of all pairs of coyotes, only four succeeded in completing the task, each of which had a coyote trained to perform the task. Scientists noticed that the success in completing the task significantly depended on how much time the observer coyote spends first looking at the actions of the relative, and then trying to complete the task: successful coyotes directly observed the relatives for 54 percent of the total observation time and then tried to repeat the actions during 77 percent of the total time that they were given to interact with the set (for comparison, in unsuccessful individuals, these indicators were equal to 29 and 19 percent). Since all successful observer individuals turned out to be dominant males, it was not possible to assess the effect of gender and rank on persistence in completing the task by coyotes.
Finally, in the third experiment (which also involved 12 pairs of coyotes), the animals received a treat from the experimenter's hands if they tried to find it in an installation similar to the one used in the second experiment: this time the used tire was not covered with plastic cover. Only two observer coyotes coped with the task: in their pairs they were dominant individuals.
Scientists have come to the conclusion that coyotes are actually capable of social learning in adulthood: this greatly expands the range of tasks to be solved. At the same time, the ability to such learning is influenced by many different factors, since not all individuals coped with the task, even with direct observation. So, among the factors that turned out to be important for successful social learning, according to the authors, were the dominance of the individual, neophobia, which was demonstrated by individuals who did not observe relatives who successfully completed the task, as well as how persistent the individual was when completing the task.
The ability for social learning and its features are observed among other species, and often relate to tasks that are not possible to meet in nature. For example, a few years ago, British zoologists taught bumblebees to pull the strings, and then they taught this to their relatives.
