Animals use behavioural cues from others to make decisions in a variety of contexts. There is growing evidence, from a range of taxa, that information about the locations of food patches can spread through a population via social connections. However, it is not known whether information about their quality transmits similarly. We studied foraging behaviour in a population of wild songbirds with known social associations and tested whether flock members use social information about the profitability of patches to inform their foraging decisions. We provided artificial patches (ephemeral bird feeders) that appeared identical but were either profitable (contained food) or unprofitable (contained no food). If information about patch profitability spreads via social associations, we predicted that empty feeders would only be sampled by individuals that are less connected to each other than expected by chance. In contrast, we found that individuals recorded at empty feeders were more closely associated with each other than predicted by a null model simulating random arrival of individuals, mirroring a pattern of increased connectedness among individuals recorded at full feeders. We then simulated arrival under network-based diffusion of information and found that the observed pattern at both full and empty feeders matched predictions derived from this post hoc model. Our results suggest that foraging songbirds use social cues only about the location of potential food sources, but not their profitability. These findings agree with the hypothesis that individuals balance the relative economic costs of using different information, where the costs of personally sampling a patch upon arrival is low relative to the cost of searching for patches. This study extends previous work on information spread through animal social networks, by suggesting important links between how individuals use information at different stages of the acquisition process and the emerging patterns of patch use at the level of the population.

中文翻译：

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觅食鸣禽群的信息使用：没有证据表明补丁质量的社会传播

动物使用来自他人的行为线索在各种情况下做出决定。越来越多的证据表明，来自一系列分类群的信息可以通过社会关系在人群中传播。然而，不知道关于它们的质量的信息是否以类似的方式传输。我们研究了一群具有已知社会关联的野生鸣禽的觅食行为，并测试了群成员是否使用有关斑块盈利能力的社会信息来告知他们的觅食决定。我们提供了看似相同但有利可图（含食物）或无利可图（不含食物）的人造补丁（临时喂鸟器）。如果关于补丁盈利能力的信息通过社会协会传播，我们预测空的饲养者只会被那些彼此联系较少的个体采样。相比之下，我们发现在空喂食器记录的个体彼此之间的关联比模拟个体随机到达的空模型预测的更紧密，反映了在完整喂食器记录的个体之间联系增加的模式。然后，我们在基于网络的信息扩散下模拟到达，发现在满和空馈线处观察到的模式与从这个 post hoc 模型得出的预测相匹配。我们的研究结果表明，觅食鸣禽仅使用有关潜在食物来源位置的社交线索，而不使用它们的盈利能力。这些发现与个人平衡使用不同信息的相对经济成本的假设一致，其中在到达时亲自采样补丁的成本相对于搜索补丁的成本较低。这项研究扩展了之前关于通过动物社交网络传播信息的工作，提出了个人在获取过程的不同阶段如何使用信息与在种群水平上出现的补丁使用模式之间的重要联系。