ArticleCommunications biology2021
Causal evidence for the adaptive benefits of social foraging in the wild.
Article in Communications biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Review
- Dinner Date: Opposite-Sex Pairs of Fruit Bats (Biology · 2025Article
- Superspreading and the evolution of virulence.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Learning on the job? Foraging strategies of juvenile versus adult Lesser black-backed gulls at their first migratory stopover.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Experimental manipulation of population density in a wild bird alters social structure but not patch discovery rate.Animal behaviour · 2024Article
- Article
- Social information use shapes the coevolution of sociality and virulence.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Causal evidence for the adaptive benefits of social foraging in the wild.Communications biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sociality is a fundamental organizing principle across taxa, thought to come with a suite of adaptive benefits. However, making causal inferences about these adaptive benefits requires experimental manipulation of the social environment, which is rarely feasible in the field. Here we manipulated the number of conspecifics in Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) in the wild, and quantified how this affected a key benefit of sociality, social foraging, by investigating several components of foraging success. As adaptive benefits of social foraging may differ between sexes, we studied males and females separately, expecting females, the more social and risk-averse sex in guppies, to benefit more from conspecifics. Conducting over 1600 foraging trials, we found that in both sexes, increasing the number of conspecifics led to faster detection of novel food patches and a higher probability of feeding following detection of the patch, resulting in greater individual resource consumption. The extent of the latter relationship differed between the sexes, with males unexpectedly exhibiting a stronger social benefit. Our study provides rare causal evidence for the adaptive benefits of social foraging in the wild, and highlights that sex differences in sociality do not necessarily imply an unequal ability to profit from the presence of others.
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Registered trials
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