Social network centrality predicts dietary decisions in wild great tits

Foraging in groups provides many benefits but also carries costs, such as competition. Social individuals can potentially alleviate competition by broadening their dietary niches through incorporating new foods. However, individuals have less information about the nutritional quality, and safety, of novel foods compared to familiar-foods. Individuals experiencing the most competitive social environments might be expected to be most likely to respond by incorporating novel foods, but it has previously been challenging to test directly how sociality relates to dietary decisions in natural populations. Here, we present RFID-tracked wild great tits (Parus major) with novel food, and use social network analysis to test how sociality predicts individuals’ foraging choices. We show that socially-central individuals with more social links have a higher propensity to use novel food compared to socially-peripheral individuals, and that this relationship is unrelated to aversion to novel feeders, ...