Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 172, February 2021, Pages 197-210
Animal Behaviour

City mice and country mice: innovative problem solving in rural and urban noncommensal rodents

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.12.007Get rights and content

Highlights

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    We compared innovative problem-solving performance of rural and urban rodents.

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    Urban individuals outperformed rural ones across situations.

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    Bolder animals were better problem solvers.

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    Motor diversity, neophobia and persistence did not predict-solving success.

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    Innovation might assist animals in dealing with anthropogenic environments.

The ability to produce innovative behaviour is a key determinant in the successful coping with environmental challenges and changes. The expansion of human-altered environments presents wildlife with multiple novel situations in which innovativeness could be beneficial. A better understanding of the drivers of within-species variation in innovation propensity and its consequences will provide insights into the traits enabling animals to thrive in the face of human-induced rapid environmental change. We compared problem-solving performance of 31 striped field mice, Apodemus agrarius, originating from rural or urban environments in a battery of eight foraging extraction tasks. We tested whether differences in problem-solving performance were mediated by the extent and duration of the animal's exploration of the experimental set-ups, the time required to solve the tasks, and their persistence. In addition, we tested the influence of the diversity of motor responses, as well as of behavioural traits boldness and activity on problem-solving performance. Urban individuals were better problem solvers despite rural individuals approaching faster and interacting longer with the test set-ups. Participation rates and time required to solve a task did not differ between rural and urban individuals. However, in case of failure to solve a task, rural mice were more persistent. The best predictors of solving success, aside from the area of origin, were the time spent exploring the set-ups and boldness, while activity and diversity of motor responses did not explain it. Problem-solving ability could thus be a contributing factor to the successful coping with the rapid and recent expansion of human-altered environments.

Section snippets

Study Sites

Animals originated from rural and urban wild populations of northern Germany. Rural striped field mice (N = 17; 10 females, 7 males) were trapped in three different sites in the region of Uckermark (53°35′N, 13°71′E) in northwest Brandenburg (see Appendix, Fig. A1). The area is characterized by agricultural landscapes and comparatively low human population density (for further details see Dammhan et al., 2020; Mazza et al., 2020). Urban striped field mice (N = 14; 7 females, 7 males) originated

Results

Participation rates were 93.7% for rural and 89.9% for urban striped field mice. Out of the 145 closed set-ups that were presented, rural striped field mice approached 133 (91.7%) and solved 69 (51.9%), while out of the 126 closed set-ups presented to the urban striped field mice, 108 (86%) were approached and 83 solved successfully (77%). In the control task, animals from both environments performed similarly (β = −0.24 ± 1.08, t = −0.22, P = 0.82; Fig. 2b). Urban striped field mice had higher solving

Discussion

The potential to produce and express innovative behaviour is likely to affect an individual's success in novel or challenging environments. In this study we tested whether striped field mice from rural and urban environments differed in their success rate in an innovative problem-solving test battery, and whether possible predictors mediate the difference in problem-solving performance. We found that urban mice performed better than rural conspecifics throughout the battery and that they

Declarations of Interest

None.

Acknowledgments

We thank E. Lösche and J. Kunkel for their precious help, care and patience in conducting the habituation phase of most mice, A. Puschmann and E. Lösche for ensuring proper care and welfare of the mice before, during and after the experiment, E. Lösche, I. Müller, M. L. Lührs and M. Dammhahn for their help in trapping the urban mice, L. Vrbanec for contributing to the development of the set-ups for house mice, and J. A. Eccard, M. Dammhahn, E. Lösche and the Animal Ecology group of the

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      In several species, individuals that are bolder or more explorative were found to have a higher likelihood of dispersing and/or of dispersing further than their shier or less explorative conspecifics (Dingemanse et al., 2003; Fraser et al., 2001; Rehage & Sih, 2004; Sih et al., 2004b), enabling them to advance into urban areas. Higher levels of boldness have been connected not only to dispersal but also to higher levels of exploratory activity (Dammhahn et al., 2020; Oliveira et al., 2020), success in problem solving (Mazza & Guenther, 2021) and high levels of aggression (Huntingford, 1976b; Hurtado & Mabry, 2017). Indeed, urban C. russula behaved not only more boldly but also more aggressively than their conspecifics from rural habitats.

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