Ah, brothers and sisters. These special relationships can be filled with everything from fun and joy to cruel pranks and teasing. Witnessing each other’s childhoods and sharing family secrets and advice with their parents makes it a relationship truly unlike any other.
This connection is also not unique to our species, according to a new study published today in the journal Biology PLOS. In some birds, siblings can be powerful role models that can even overshadow parental influence.
“Much of our knowledge about social learning in juveniles comes from species that benefit from prolonged periods of parental care, including humans,” Sonja Wild, study co-author and behavioral ecologist, said in a statement. “Parents learn a lot because their offspring and their parents spend a lot of time together. But what happens with knowledge transfer when parental protection is limited?”
I would like to solve the riddle
The team used the songbird Major appearance commonly called great tit, as a model species. They observed that siblings and other adults can be crucial sources of learning when Mom and Dad don’t fill that role. This alternative learning pathway may explain some behavioral similarities in bird families that benefit from parental input.
“When they leave the nest, they don’t know anything,” Wild said of the species. “They can’t feed themselves or find shelter. All they have is about 10 days of parental care to figure it all out. The offspring would like to extend that time. They follow their parents and continue to beg, but the parents are exhausted and start to withdraw. So the selection pressure is very strong for the offspring to quickly figure out how to find food themselves.”
To learn more about these social learning strategies, the team presented 51 breeding pairs and their 229 new young with food puzzles over a 10-week period. In puzzles, sliding the door left or right would reveal a delicious tray of mealworms. According to Wild, using these fully automated puzzle boxes allowed the team to collect “tens of thousands of solutions” that helped them make connections and patterns in the young birds’ learning and decision-making strategies as they became more independent.
Biting 72 pounds of mealworms
After 10 weeks of tracking the birds’ solving behavior, they found that the birds were more likely to learn to solve the puzzle if they had parents who were also expert problem-solvers. However, juvenile birds’ solving strategies were actually more strongly influenced by how their siblings and the non-parent adults around them solved the puzzle.
Of the new learners in each sibling group, about 75 percent learned from adults who were not their biological parents and about 25 percent learned from their parents. Of the other learners in each group, about 94 percent learned to solve the puzzle with help from their siblings.
At the start of the study, the team wasn’t really sure if the youngsters could even learn to solve the puzzle, but quickly saw how eager they were to participate in the experiments. They ate about 72 pounds of mealworms in just a few weeks.
[ Related: Baby orangutans spy on mom to build cozy treehouse nests. ]
In search of animal crops
According to the team, understanding behaviors of even smaller animals like this can be useful for understanding biodiversity and wildlife conservation.
“The more diverse animal cultures, the more resilient populations are to extinction and able to cope with environmental fluctuations,” Wild said. “These species are less vulnerable because they have many different models from which they can obtain cultural and socially learned information.”
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