'Facebook for Animals' Tested On Wild Great Tits

ScienceDaily (June 18, 2012) — A new way of analyzing the social networks that link individual animals to each other has been tested on wild great tits by Oxford University researchers.

How animals associate in groups can have important consequences in terms of the health and survival of both individuals and whole populations; influencing factors such as the spread of disease and the ability to find food or mates.

But revealing the networks underlying animal societies is a challenge when a large amount of fieldwork data consists of a long stream of automated observations of the times and locations of individuals, leaving scientists to try and reconstruct the 'big picture' of how individuals are connected.

The new approach can automatically identify periods of intense social activity within a large number of observations -- in this example around one million observations of wild great tits (Parus major). This makes it possible to examine these periods in greater detail and calculate which individuals are real 'friends', rather than random passers-by, and even which are looking to pair up and mate.

A report of the research is published in this week's Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120618150519.htm

Birds Form Alliances With Long-Term Neighbors

Like contestants on the game show "Survivor," the small birds called great tits form alliances with their neighboring great tits to defend their nests.

New research shows how the neighboring birds will work together to fend off predators such as woodpeckers — but only if they have been neighbors for over a year. Then they will collaborate in an anti-predator action called "mobbing."

"They give a loud alarm, they make these conspicuous, exaggerated flights, and they hover and swoop down on the predator. … It gets quite loud and the birds are very agitated," study researcher Ada Grabowska-Zhang, a graduate student at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. "The more individuals participate in that behavior, the more likely they are to succeed."

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/19882-great-tit-neighbor-alliances.html