Social foraging provides animals with opportunities to gain knowledge about available food. Studies indicate that animals are influenced by social context during exploration and are able to learn socially. Carrion and hooded crows, which are opportunistic generalists with flexible social systems, have so far received little focus in this area. We combined observational and experimental approaches to investigate social interactions during foraging and social influences on crow behaviour within a free-ranging population at Vienna Zoo, which included 115 individually marked crows. We expected the crows to be tolerant of conspecifics during foraging due to high food abundance. We predicted that social context would enhance familiar object exploration, as well as a specific foraging strategy: predation by crows on other species. We found that crows were highly tolerant of one another, as reflected by their high rates of cofeeding - where they fed directly beside conspecific(s) - relative to affiliative or agonistic interactions. Evidence for social facilitation - when the observer's behaviour is affected by the mere presence of a model - was found in both object exploration and predation behaviour. Specifically, crows touched the objects more frequently when others were present (whilst only approaching the objects when alone), and conspecifics were present more frequently during predation events involving the high-risk target species. Evidence for enhancement during object exploration - where the observer's attention is drawn to a place or object by a model's actions - was not confirmed in this context. Our results highlight the role played by the presence of conspecifics across different contexts: natural foraging behaviour, familiar object exploration and a specific foraging strategy. To our knowledge, this is one of the first corvid studies aimed at teasing apart specific social influence and learning mechanisms in the field. These crows therefore make promising candidates for studying social learning and its consequences under naturalistic conditions.

中文翻译：

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自由放养乌鸦（Corvus corone corone; C. c.cornix）觅食行为中的宽容和社会便利化

社会性觅食为动物提供了获取可用食物知识的机会。研究表明，动物在探索过程中会受到社会环境的影响，并且能够进行社会学习。腐肉和蒙面乌鸦是具有灵活社会系统的机会主义通才，迄今为止在这一领域几乎没有受到关注。我们结合观察和实验方法来研究觅食期间的社会互动和社会对维也纳动物园自由放养种群中乌鸦行为的影响，其中包括 115 只单独标记的乌鸦。由于食物丰富，我们预计乌鸦在觅食期间能够容忍同种动物。我们预测，社会背景将增强熟悉的物体探索，以及特定的觅食策略：乌鸦捕食其他物种。我们发现乌鸦对彼此的容忍度很高，这反映在它们的高共同喂食率上 - 它们直接在同种动物旁边喂食 - 相对于附属或竞争性相互作用。在对象探索和捕食行为中都发现了社会促进的证据 - 当观察者的行为受到模型存在的影响时 - 。具体来说，当有其他人在场时，乌鸦接触物体的频率更高（而只有在单独时才接近物体），而在涉及高风险目标物种的捕食事件中，同种动物的出现频率更高。在对象探索期间增强的证据——观察者的注意力被模型的动作吸引到一个地方或对象——在这种情况下没有得到证实。我们的研究结果强调了在不同背景下存在同种生物所起的作用：自然觅食行为、熟悉的物体探索和特定的觅食策略。据我们所知，这是旨在梳理该领域特定社会影响和学习机制的首批 Corvid 研究之一。因此，这些乌鸦成为研究自然条件下社会学习及其后果的有希望的候选者。