Data from: Females facilitate male food patch discovery in a wild fish population

1. Responding to the information provided by others is an important
foraging strategy in many species. Through social foraging, individuals
can more efficiently find unpredictable resources and thereby increase
their foraging success. 2. When individuals are more socially responsive
to particular phenotypes than others, however, the advantage they obtain
from foraging socially is likely to depend on the phenotype composition of
the social environment. We tested this hypothesis by performing
experimental manipulations of guppy, Poecilia reticulata, sex compositions
in the wild. 3. Males found fewer novel food patches in the absence of
females than in mixed-sex compositions, while female patch discovery did
not differ regardless of the presence or absence of males. 4. We argue
that these results were driven by sex-dependent mechanisms of social
association: Markov chain-based fission-fusion modelling revealed that
less social individuals found fewer patches and that males reduced
sociality when females were absent. In contrast, females were similarly
social with or without males. 5. Our findings highlight the relevance of
considering how individual and population-level traits interact in shaping
the advantages of social foraging in the wild.