Social foraging and the associated benefits of group-living in Cliff Swallows decrease over 40 years

Animals that feed socially can sometimes better locate prey, often by transferring information about food that is patchy, dense, and temporally and spatially unpredictable. Information transfer is a potential benefit of living in breeding colonies where unsuccessful foragers can more readily locate successful ones and thereby improve feeding efficiency. Most studies on social foraging have been short-term, and how long-term environmental change affects both foraging strategies and the associated benefits of coloniality is generally unknown. In the colonial Cliff Swallow (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota), we examined how social foraging, information transfer, and feeding ecology changed over a 40-year period in western Nebraska. Relative to the 1980’s, Cliff Swallows in 2016–2022 were more likely to forage solitarily or in smaller groups, spent less time foraging, were more successful as solitaries, fed in more variable locations, and engaged less in information transfer at the colony site. The..., , , README file for Data from Ecological Monographs, “**Social foraging and the associated benefits of group-living in Cliff Swallows decrease over 40 years**.” It is requested that any user of these data notify the corresponding author, Charles R. Brown, . Each tab in the data file is keyed to a specific analysis in the paper, as described by the Table No. in the tab title. Note that for colony site, the same code is used for any given site across all analyses. Colony size refers to the number of cliff swallow nests active at the site. In some cases, SAS was used to concatenate variables in the Excel files to create new variables, and these variables do not show here.  In cases where all data in an analysis are given in the paper (e.g., main Table 1, Table S7) or the information is descriptive (Table S1), they are not shown here.

If data are missing for a given cell, it is denoted with “.” (or in some cases by a blank).

Table S2-S4: Each row contains data for each scan at a colony on a g...