Repeated parallel differentiation of social learning differences in benthic and limnetic threespine stickleback fish

Individuals can reduce sampling costs and increase foraging efficiency by using information provided by others. One simple form of social information use is delayed local enhancement, or increased interest in a location because of the past presence of others. We tested for delayed local enhancement in two ecomorphs of stickleback fish, benthic and limnetic, from three different lakes with putative independent evolutionary origins. Two of these lakes have reproductively isolated ecomorphs (‘species-pairs’), whereas in the third a previously intact species-pair recently collapsed into a hybrid swarm. Benthic fish in both intact species-pair lakes were more likely to exhibit delayed local enhancement despite being more solitary than limnetic fish. Their behaviour and morphology suggest their current perceived risk and past evolutionary pressure from predation did not drive this difference. In the hybrid swarm lake, we found a reversal in patterns of social information use, with limnetic-lo..., Methods used to generate the dataset can be found in the associated manuscript. The full analysis script for recreating statistics and figures is included as part of this submission., Data files are csv format. We used R v 4.0.2 for analysis. Necessary packages are listed in the code: ggplot2, car, MASS, AER., # Repeated parallel differentiation of social learning differences in benthic and limnetic threespine stickleback fish

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Stickleback fish were tested in a delayed local enhancement paradigm where observers could see two demonstrator shoals, one of which was fed reward items and the other was not in special feeders that prevented the observer from seeing the food itself, but instead only the behavior of the demonstrator shoals. Once demonstrators were removed, observers were given the opportunity to explore the tank and their side preference was observed.

## Description of the data and file structure

There are two data files:

**Delayed Local Enhancement Trial Metadata.csv** - information about each delayed local enhancement trial, including ones featuring populations that were not the focus of our manuscript.

Mistrial: flag indicating if a trial was a mistrial (Y/N). Mistrials were because of experimenter error.
Did not move: flag indicating if a fish did not move after being rel...,