2024/11/22 by Rachael Miller, Vedrana Slipogor, Kai Caspar +4 · 3 voices · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Psychology · #Animal Behavior and Reproduction #Animal and Plant Science Education #Behavioral Health and Interventions
paper · pdf · doi:10.31219/osf.io/qhy8m
Neophobia, or aversion to novelty, is important for adaptability and survival as it influences the ways in which animals navigate risk and interact with their environments. Across taxa, species and individuals, neophobia is found to vary considerably, but exploring the wider evolutionary drivers of neophobia is hampered by a lack of comparative multi-species studies using standardised methods. Here, we utilised the ManyBirds Project, a Big Team Science large-scale collaborative open science framework, to pool efforts and resources of 129 collaborators at 77 institutions from 23 countries worldwide across six continents. We examined both difference scores (between novel object test and control conditions) and raw data of latency to touch familiar food in the presence (test) and absence (control) of a novel object among 1439 subjects from 136 bird species across 25 taxonomic orders incorporating lab, field and zoo sites. We tested effects of 1) taxonomic order differences; 2) socio-ecological factors including diet, sociality, habitat and range, while accounting for phylogeny; and 3) individual repeatability in object neophobia. We found that at the order level, neophobia was markedly affected by phylogeny. At the species level, using difference scores, species with more specialist diets were more neophobic than those with more generalist diets, providing strong support for the Neophobia Threshold Hypothesis. Migratory species were also more neophobic than non-migratory species, which supports the Dangerous Niche Hypothesis. Finally, we found individual repeatability across time (i.e. across test rounds) and contexts (i.e. controls and novel object tests). Using the largest-scale multi-order study of neophobia to date, our approach and results show that neophobia is a stable behavioural trait predicted by phylogeny. We have identified evolutionary drivers of neophobia across the avian clade and demonstrated the potential of Big Team Science research to reveal broad patterns of bird behaviour.