Self-control, that is, overcoming impulsivity towards immediate gratification in favour of a greater but delayed reward, is seen as a valuable skill when making future-oriented decisions. Experimental studies in nonhuman primates revealed that individuals of some species are willing to tolerate delays of up to several minutes in order to gain food of a higher quantity or quality. Recently, birds (carrion crows, Corvus corone, common ravens, Corvus corax, Goffin cockatoos, Cacatua goffiniana) performed comparably to primates in an exchange task, contradicting previous notions that birds may lack any impulse control. However, performance differed strikingly with the currency of exchange: individuals of all three species performed better when asked to wait for a higher food quality, rather than quantity. Here, we built on this work and tested whether the apparent difference in levels of self-control expressed in quality versus quantity tasks reflects cognitive constraints or is merely due to methodological limitations. In addition to the exchange paradigm, we applied another established delay maintenance methodology: the accumulation task. In this latter task, food items accumulated to a maximum of four pieces, whereas in the exchange task, an initial item could be exchanged for a reward item after a certain time delay elapsed. In both tasks, birds (seven crows, five ravens) were asked to wait in order to optimize either the quality or the quantity of food. We found that corvids were willing to delay gratification when it led to a food reward of higher quality, but not when waiting was rewarded with a higher quantity, independent of the experimental paradigm. This study is the first to test crows and ravens with two different paradigms, the accumulation and the exchange of food, within the same experiment, allowing for fair comparisons between methods and species. (Stevens & Stephens, 2010), ranging from foraging decisions (Kacelnik, 2003; reviewed in Stephens & Anderson, 2001) to social interactions, for example mate choice (Sozou & Seymour, 2003) or reciprocity in cooperative events (Stevens & Hauser, 2004). Going for the immediately available but less preferred option instead of postponing action in favour of an overall better but delayed reward is defined as impulsivity, whereas self-control refers to the opposite strategy (Ainslie, 1974;Kalenscher, Ohmann, & Güntürkün, 2006;Logue, Chavarro, Rachlin, & Reeder, 1988). Europe PMC Funders GroupFrom an economical point of view, the preference for a maximum payoff should be selected for (Noë, Hooff, & Hammerstein, 2001) 2005). It has been commonly suggested that temporal discounting is a critical factor in intertemporal decisions (Kacelnik & Bateson, 1996;Kalenscher & Pennartz, 2008;Stevens & Stephens, 2010). Accordingly, future rewards are subjectively rated less valuable the longer the delay until they are received, because delay is associated with uncertainty for realization of the benefits and probability of loss. Alternatively, it has been argued th...

1.The social decisions that individuals make, in terms of where to move, who to interact with and how frequently, scale up to generate social structure. Such structure has profound consequences: individuals each have a unique social environment, social interactions can amplify or dampen individual differences at the population level, and population-level ecological and evolutionary processes can be governed by higher-level ‘emergent properties’ of animal societies.2.Here we review how explicitly accounting for social structure in animal populations has generated new hypotheses and has revised existing predictions in ecology and evolution. That is, we synthesize the insights gained by applying ‘network-thinking’ rather than the utility of applying social network analysis as a methodological tool. 3.We start with what has been learned about the generative mechanisms that underpin social structure. We then outline the major implications that social structure has been found to have on population processes, on how selection operates and organisms can evolve, and on co-evolutionary dynamics between social structure and population processes. Finally, we highlight areas for which there is clear evidence that accounting for social structure will refine current thinking, but where examples remain scarce.4.Applying ‘network thinking’ in biology presents not only new challenges, but also many opportunities to advance different areas of research. Addressing the question of how social structure changes the biological relationships linking individuals to populations, and populations to processes, is revealing commonalities across scientific disciplines. In doing so, animal social networks can bridge otherwise disparate research topics and, in the future, we hope will allow for more unified theories in biology.

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Wintering songbirds have been widely shown to make economic foraging decisions to manage the changing balance of risks from predation and starvation over the course of the day. In this study, we ask whether the communication and use of information about food availability differ throughout the day. First, we assessed temporal variation in food-related vocal information produced in foraging flocks of tits ( Paridae ) using audio recordings at radio-frequency identification-equipped feeding stations. Vocal activity was highest in the morning and decreased into the afternoon. This pattern was not explained by there being fewer birds present, as we found that group sizes increased over the course of the day. Next, we experimentally tested the underlying causes for this diurnal calling pattern. We set up bird feeders with or without playback of calls from tits, either in the morning or in the afternoon, and compared latency to feeder discovery, accumulation of flock members, and total number of birds visiting the feeder. Irrespective of time of day, playbacks had a strong effect on all three response measures when compared to silent control trials, demonstrating that tits will readily use vocal information to improve food detection throughout the day. Thus, the diurnal pattern of foraging behaviour did not appear to affect use and production of food-related vocalizations. Instead, we suggest that, as the day progresses and foraging group sizes increase, the costs of producing calls at the food source (e.g. competition and attraction of predators) outweigh the benefits of recruiting group members (i.e. adding individuals to large groups only marginally increases safety in numbers), causing the observed decrease in vocal activity into the afternoon. Our findings imply that individuals make economic social adjustments based on conditions of their social environment when deciding to vocally recruit group members.

Animals use behavioural cues from others to make decisions in a variety of contexts. There is growing evidence, from a range of taxa, that information about the locations of food patches can spread through a population via social connections. However, it is not known whether information about the quality of potential food sources transmits similarly. We studied foraging behaviour in a population of wild songbirds with known social associations, and tested whether flock members use social information about the profitability of patches to inform their foraging decisions. We provided artificial patches (ephemeral bird feeders) that appeared identical but were either profitable (contained food) or unprofitable (contained no food). If information about patch profitability spreads via social associations, we predicted that empty feeders would only be sampled by individuals that are less connected to each other than expected by chance. In contrast, we found that individuals recorded at empty feeders were more closely associated with each other than predicted by a null model simulating random arrival of individuals, mirroring pattern of increased connectedness among individuals recorded at full feeders. We then simulated arrival under network-based diffusion of information, and demonstrate that the observed pattern at both full and empty feeders matches predictions derived from this post-hoc model. Our results suggest that foraging songbirds only use social cues about the location of potential food sources, but not their profitability. These findings agree with the hypothesis that individuals balance the relative economic costs of using different information, where the costs of personally sampling a patch upon arrival is low relative to the cost of searching for patches. This study extends previous work on information spread through animal social networks, by suggesting important links between how individuals use information at different stages of the acquisition process and the emerging population-level patterns of patch use.

Researchers in ecology and evolutionary biology are increasingly dependent on computational code to conduct research, and the use of efficient methods to share, reproduce, and collaborate on code as well as any research-related documentation has become fundamental. GitHub is an online, cloud-based service that can help researchers track, organize, discuss, share, and collaborate on software and other materials related to research production, including data, code for analyses, and protocols.Despite these benefits, the use of GitHub by EEB researchers is not widespread due to the lack of domain-specific information and guidelines. To help EEB researchers adopt useful features from GitHub in their own workflows, we review twelve practical ways to use the platform. We outline features ranging from low to high technical difficulty: storing code, managing projects, coding collaboratively, conducting peer review, and writing a manuscript. Given that members of a research team may have different technical skills and responsibilities, we describe how the optimal use of GitHub features may vary among members of a research collaboration. As more ecologists and evolutionary biologists establish their workflows using GitHub, the field can continue to push the boundaries of collaborative, transparent, and open research.

In the Arctic, seasonal variation in the accessibility of the land, sea ice, and open waters influences which resources can be harvested safely and efficiently. Climate stressors are also increasingly affecting access to subsistence resources. Within Inuit communities, people differ in their involvement with subsistence activities, but little is know about how engagement in the cash economy (time and money available) and other socio-economic factors shape the food production choices of Inuit harvesters, and their ability to adapt to rapid ecological change. We analyse 281 foraging trips involving 23 Inuit harvesters from Kangiqsujuaq, Nunavik, using a Bayesian approach modeling both patch choice and within-patch success. Gender and income predict Inuit harvest strategies: while men, especially men from low-income households, often visit patches with a relatively low success probability, women and high-income hunters generally have a higher propensity to choose low-risk patches. Inland hunting, marine hunting, and fishing differ in the required equipment and effort, and hunters may have to shift their subsistence activities if certain patches become less profitable or less safe due to high costs of transportation or climate change (e.g., navigate larger areas inland instead of targeting seals on the sea ice). Our finding that household income predicts patch choice suggests that Inuit differ in their capacity to maintain access to country foods depending on their status in the wage economy.

10 1. Natural populations and communities consist of individuals that differ in their 11 phenotypes. There is increasing evidence in community ecology that consistent 12 intraspecific variation in behaviour changes the outcome of ecological interactions.13 2. Differences in intra-and inter-specific interactions are expected to play a major role in 14 determining patterns of species coexistence and community structure. However, the 15 question of whether individuals vary in their propensity to associate with heterospecifics 16 has been neglected.173. We used social network analysis to characterise pattern of heterospecific associations 18 in wild mixed-species flocks of songbirds, and assessed whether individuals adopt 19 consistent social strategies in their broader, heterospecific, social environment. We 20 quantified heterospecific foraging associations using data from a large automatically 21 monitored PIT-tagged population of birds, involving more than 300 000 observations of 22 flock membership, collected over three winters, for two tit species (Paridae), blue tits, 23Cyanistes caeruleus, and great tits, Parus major. 24 4. We assessed individual consistency in interspecific social preferences over both short-25 term (week-to-week) and longer-term (year-to-year) timescales for a total of 4610 26 individuals, and found that blue tits and great tits exhibited marked and consistent 27 intraspecific differences in heterospecific social phenotypes in terms of both absolute 28 2 and relative number of associates. Further, we found that these consistent differences 29 were significantly greater than expected from spatial and temporal differences in 30 population densities. 31 5. Heterospecific associations represent a major component of the social environment for 32 many species, and our results show that individuals vary consistently in their social 33 decisions with respect to heterospecifics. These findings provide support for the notion 34 that intraspecific trait variation contributes to patterns at community and ecosystem 35 levels. 36 37