Kea cooperate better with sharing affiliates

Abstract

Controlled studies that focus on intraspecific cooperation tasks have revealed striking similarities, but also differences, in abilities across taxa as diverse as primates, fish, and birds. Such comparisons may provide insight into the specific socio-ecological selection pressures that led to the evolution of cooperation. Unfortunately, however, compared to primates data on birds remain relatively scarce. We tested a New Zealand psittaciform, the kea, in a dyadic cooperation task using the loose-string design. During trials our subjects were in separate compartments, but obtained a common reward that could be divided multiple ways, allowing the examination of reward division effects. Ten individuals were tested twice in 44 combinations of partners. Dyads with a high affiliation score attempted to cooperate more often and were also more often successful in doing so. Furthermore, dyads that shared rewards more equally seemed to be more likely to attempt cooperation in the next trial. Like other bird and some monkey species, but unlike, for example, chimpanzees, kea did not spontaneously show understanding of either the role of the partner or the mechanism behind the cooperation task. This may point to true disparities between species, but may also be due to differences in task design and/or the amount of exposure to similar tasks and individual skills of the subjects.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10071-016-1017-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Food sharing and affiliation: An experimental and longitudinal study in cockatiels (Nymphicus hollandicus)

“…In capuchins monkey ( Cebus apella ), prosocial tendencies increase with social closeness (de Waal, Leimgruber, & Greenberg, ). In keas ( Nestor notabilis ), when tested in a loose‐string paradigm where birds had to cooperate to obtain a reward, birds cooperated more with affiliates and were also more successful when tested with affiliates than with non‐affiliates (Schwing, Jocteur, Wein, Noë, & Massen, ). In birds, affiliative interactions can be easily measured by recording allopreening and maintenance of close proximity (Seibert, ), as observed in captive groups of spectacled parrotlets ( Forpus conspicillatus ; Garnetzke‐Stollmann & Franck, ).…”

Comparing physical and social cognitive skills in macaque species with different degrees of social tolerance

“…At the individual level, several studies have also now demonstrated that tolerance is indeed an important factor explaining the likelihood and success of cooperation in different animal taxa such as birds (e.g. [4][5][6][7]), carnivores (e.g. [8]) and non-human primates (e.g.…”

Importance of a species’ socioecology: Wolves outperform dogs in a conspecific cooperation task

“…However, if only one end of the string is pulled, the other end becomes inaccessible and the tray cannot be moved forward anymore, rendering the trial unsuccessful. This task has been used with a wide range of species, from ravens to elephants [chimpanzees (27)(28)(29), macaques (30), elephants (31), gray parrots (32), rooks (33), ravens (34), kea (35,36), and dogs (37)], with many succeeding in solving the task after being initially trained individually to pull the tray out by pulling both ends of the rope together.…”