THE IMPORTANCE OF CERTAIN ASSEMBLAGES OF BIRDS AS “INFORMATION‐CENTRES” FOR FOOD‐FINDING

1973/10/01 by Peter D. Ward, P. Ward, A. Zahavi +1 · 37 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Plant and animal studies #Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies #Avian ecology and behavior

paper · doi:10.1111/j.1474-919x.1973.tb01990.x

Abstract

Summary Evidence is presented to support the hypothesis that communal roosts, breeding colonies and certain other bird assemblages have been evolved primarily for the efficient exploitation of unevenly‐distributed food sources by serving as “information‐centres”. Predation‐pressure is regarded as being the most important factor “shaping” the assemblages. The shaping involves the choice of inaccessible or otherwise safe sites, optimum dispersal, mutual awareness of attack and joint defensive tactics, and serves to minimise the vulnerability to predation which would otherwise result when birds mass together in conspicuous, and often predictable centres.

Cited by

• Pairing weather radars with eBird data for large-scale monitoring of swallow and martin communal roosts
• Feeding Habitats of Nesting Wading Birds: Spatial Use and Social Influences
• Collective decision making through food recruitment
• Movement simulations reveal both memory and social information drive individual foraging site fidelity in gannets
• Social cues from neighboring patches influence patch dynamics in a spatially structured population of a colonial bird
• Population Responses to Patchy Environments
• Avian everyday activism: Invasion, presence, occupation
• Cool season communal roosting of Cratilla lineata in a Taiwanese submontane forest (Odonata: Libellulidae)
• Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong incentive
• Predators and scavengers: Polar bears as marine carrion providers
• Contrasting haemoparasite prevalence in larid species with divergent ecological niches and migration patterns
• Bird nest [wikipedia]
• Relaxed predation risk reduces but does not eliminate sociality in birds. [europepmc]
• The evolutionary pathway to obligate scavenging in Gyps vultures. [europepmc]
• The benefit of being a social butterfly: communal roosting deters predation. [europepmc]
• At-sea associations in foraging little penguins. [europepmc]
• Avian roosting behavior influences vector-host interactions for West Nile virus hosts. [europepmc]
• Non-kin cooperation in bats. [europepmc]
• Benefits of Group Living Include Increased Feeding Efficiency and Lower Mass Loss during Desiccation in the Social and Inbreeding Spider Stegodyphus dumicola. [europepmc]
• Habitat-specific foraging strategies in Australasian gannets. [europepmc]
• Social foraging and individual consistency in following behaviour: testing the information centre hypothesis in free-ranging vultures. [europepmc]
• Ontogeny of foraging behaviour in juvenile red-footed boobies (Sula sula). [europepmc]
• Evidence of sociality in the timing and location of foraging in a colonial seabird. [europepmc]
• Spatial segregation of home ranges between neighbouring colonies in a diurnal raptor. [europepmc]
• A three-decade review of telemetry studies on vultures and condors. [europepmc]
• Social buffering of stress in a group-living fish. [europepmc]
• Breeding Brown Pelicans Improve Foraging Performance as Energetic Needs Rise. [europepmc]
• Effect of conspecific neighbors on the foraging activity levels of the wintering Oriental Storks ( Ciconia boyciana ): Benefits of social information. [europepmc]
• A new two-fingered dinosaur sheds light on the radiation of Oviraptorosauria. [europepmc]
• Breeding habitat loss reveals limited foraging flexibility and increases foraging effort in a colonial breeding seabird. [europepmc]
• Decoding alarm signal propagation of seed-harvester ants using automated movement tracking and supervised machine learning. [europepmc]
• Conformist social learning leads to self-organised prevention against adverse bias in risky decision making. [europepmc]
• The response to stressors in adulthood depends on the interaction between prenatal exposure to glucocorticoids and environmental context. [europepmc]
• Stay close, but not too close: aerial image analysis reveals patterns of social distancing in seal colonies. [europepmc]
• Breeding density affects the movements of gull chicks, the size of their home ranges and their association with neighbours. [europepmc]
• Spatial memory obviates following behaviour in an information centre of wild fruit bats. [europepmc]
• Sharing sleeping sites disrupts sleep but catalyses social tolerance and coordination between groups. [europepmc]

Related

• Collective decision making and social interaction rules in mixed-species flocks of songbirds
• Adaptive learning and coloniality in birds
• Limited resources and evolutionary learning may help to understand the mistimed reproduction in birds caused by climate change
• Habitat‐mediated predation risk and decision making of small birds at forest edges
• Bird community interactions at water sources at Hastings Natural History Reservation