Wild birds respond to flockmate loss by increasing their social network associations to others

Understanding the consequences of losing individuals from wild populations is a current and pressing issue, yet how such loss influences the social behaviour of the remaining animals is largely unexplored. Through combining the automated tracking of winter flocks of over 500 wild great tits (Parus major) with removal experiments, we assessed how individuals' social network positions responded to the loss of their social associates. We found that the extent of flockmate loss that individuals experienced correlated positively with subsequent increases in the number of their social associations, the average strength of their bonds and their overall connectedness within the social network (defined as summed edge weights). Increased social connectivity was not driven by general disturbance or changes in foraging behaviour, but by modifications to fine-scale social network connections in response to losing their associates. Therefore, the reduction in social connectedness expected by individu...

探究野生种群个体消失所引发的后果是当前亟需关注的重要议题，然而此类个体消失如何影响剩余动物的社会行为，在很大程度上仍未得到系统探索。本研究通过结合对500余只野生大山雀（Parus major）越冬集群的自动化追踪技术与移除实验，评估了个体的社会网络地位如何响应其社会同伴的消失。研究发现，个体所经历的同伴消失程度，与其后续社会关联数量、社会联结平均强度，以及其在社会网络中的整体连通性（定义为边权重之和）均呈正相关。社会连通性的提升并非由一般性干扰或觅食行为改变所驱动，而是源于个体在失去社会同伴后对社会网络精细尺度联结的调整。因此，个体所预期的社会连通性降低……