Movement and conformity interact to establish local behavioural traditions in animal populations

Somveille, Marius ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6868-5080, Firth, Josh A., Aplin, Lucy M., Farine, Damien R., Sheldon, Ben C. and Thompson, Robin N. (2018) Movement and conformity interact to establish local behavioural traditions in animal populations. PLoS Computational Biology, 14 (12). ISSN 1553-734X

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Abstract

The social transmission of information is critical to the emergence of animal culture. Two processes are predicted to play key roles in how socially-transmitted information spreads in animal populations: the movement of individuals across the landscape and conformist social learning. We develop a model that, for the first time, explicitly integrates these processes to investigate their impacts on the spread of behavioural preferences. Our results reveal a strong interplay between movement and conformity in determining whether locally-variable traditions establish across a landscape or whether a single preference dominates the whole population. The model is able to replicate a real-world cultural diffusion experiment in great tits Parus major, but also allows for a range of predictions for the emergence of animal culture under various initial conditions, habitat structure and strength of conformist bias to be made. Integrating social behaviour with ecological variation will be important for understanding the stability and diversity of culture in animals.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data Availability: Data on the movement of birds in Wytham Woods, and on the forest distance measure, are from Farine & Sheldon (2016) bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/085944 Funding Information: This research was supported by grants from the BBSRC (BBB/L006081/1) and the ERC (AdG 250164) to BCS, an EGI Postdoctoral Fellowship to MS, and a Christ Church Junior Research Fellowship to RNT; DRF and LMA were funded by the Max Planck Society. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics,modelling and simulation,ecology,molecular biology,genetics,cellular and molecular neuroscience,computational theory and mathematics ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1100/1105
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	22 Jul 2024 10:33
Last Modified:	12 Nov 2024 00:51
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/95985
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006647

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