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, to benefit more from conspecifics than males. Conducting over 1,600 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 slope 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.

中文翻译：

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野外社会觅食的适应性收益的因果证据

社会性是整个分类单元的基本组织原则，被认为具有一系列适应性好处。但是，要对这些适应性收益做出因果推断，就需要对社会环境进行实验性操纵，而这在该领域很少可行。在这里，我们研究了野生特立尼达孔雀鱼（Poecilia reticulata）中同种异体的数量，并通过调查觅食成功的几个组成部分，定量了这如何影响社交性，社会觅食的关键利益。由于性别之间社交觅食的适应性好处可能有所不同，因此我们分别研究了男性和女性，并期望女性比男性更具社会性和规避风险的性行为从种属中受益。我们进行了1600多次觅食试验，发现在男女中，增加特定种类的数量会导致更快地检测到新的食品补丁，并在检测到补丁之后有更高的进食可能性，从而导致更大的个人资源消耗。后者之间的关系的斜率在性别之间有所不同，男性出人意料地表现出较强的社会效益。我们的研究为野外社交觅食的适应性益处提供了罕见的因果证据，并强调了社交中的性别差异并不一定意味着从他人的存在中获利的不平等能力。