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, number of feeding observations, and demographic factors. We
demonstrate how our findings indicate sociable individuals can offset the
costs of highly competitive social environments by foraging more broadly.
Finally, we discuss how competition may drive behavioural change in
natural populations, and the implications for understanding the causes and
consequences of social strategies and dietary decisions.