Mate familiarity and social learning in a monogamous lizard

Abstract

Social learning is thought to be advantageous as it allows an animal to gather information quickly without engaging in costly trial-and-error learning. However, animals should be selective about when and whom they learn from. Familiarity is predicted to positively influence an animal's reliance on social learning; yet, few studies have empirically tested this theory. We used a lizard (Liopholis whitii) that forms long-term monogamous pair bonds to examine the effects of partner familiarity on social learning in two novel foraging tasks, an association and a reversal task. We allowed female lizards to observe trained conspecifics that were either familiar (social mate) or unfamiliar execute these tasks and compared these two groups with control females that did not receive social information. Lizards preferentially relied on trial-and-error learning in the association task. In the reversal task, lizards that were demonstrated by familiar partners learnt in fewer trials compared to control lizards and made more correct choices. Our results provide some evidence for context-dependent learning with lizards differentiating between when they utilize social learning, and, to a limited degree, whom they learnt from. Understanding the role of the social context in which learning occurs provides important insights into the benefits of social learning and sociality more generally.

Life history response of Echinops gmelinii Turcz. to variation in the rainfall pattern in a temperate desert

“…In contrast, other studies have reported similar or higher seed germination of offspring in response to better water conditions in the maternal environment (Breen & Richards, 2008; Pias et al, 2010; Yang et al, 2011). However, Mojzes et al (2018) showed that offspring seed germination in the winter annual grass Secale sylvestre was not influenced by the environmental conditions associated with their mother plants. The offspring seed germination of E. gmelinii was negatively correlated with high reproduction effort among their mother plants, which could prevent most of the seed germination occurring with a single year and contribute to the formation of a persistent soil seed bank.…”

“…3 and 4). Similarly, some water manipulation experiments in arid and semiarid ecosystems showed that reductions in the amount of rainfall usually limit plant growth and/or seed production, whereas an increased water supply has the opposite effect (Breen & Richards, 2008; Volis, Ormanbekova & Yermekbayev, 2015; Mojzes et al, 2018). The response of E. gmelinii root/shoot ratio to rainfall amount was consistent with that of plants growing in arid regions, in which increased allocation to roots may be advantageous for capturing limiting soil resources (Padilla et al, 2013; Gao et al, 2015; Shan et al, 2018; Chen et al, 2019a).…”

“…In the southwestern United States, less frequent and larger rainfall events could provide a competitive advantage to Bouteloua gracilis and influence species composition in the arid-semiarid grassland ecotone (Thomey et al, 2014). Despite the existence of many experimental studies demonstrating links between rainfall regimes and ecological processes, the understanding of the plant species response to variation in rainfall patterns at the regional scale is still inadequate (Miranda, Padilla & Pugnaire, 2009; Thomey et al, 2014; Gao et al, 2015; Mojzes et al, 2018; March-Salas & Fitze, 2019).…”

“…The plasticity of certain regeneration traits, such as seed germination and seedling growth, is highly unknown, despite the critical role of early life-history stages in plant population persistence (Walck et al, 2011; Hanel & Tielborger, 2015). Moreover, the plastic response of an individual can be expressed not only as within-generation phenotypic plasticity but also the potential importance of maternal environmental effects on plant species’, which responses to global environmental changes has been highlighted by an increasing number of studies (Hovenden et al, 2008; Pias et al, 2010; Fenesi et al, 2014; Walter et al, 2016; Mojzes et al, 2018). Rainfall changes in the maternal environment could influence offspring germination behaviors because dormancy has been found to be broken by drought (Cendán, Sampedro & Zas, 2013; Baskin & Baskin, 2014; Chen et al, 2019b).…”

“…Winter annuals contribute substantially to plant diversity in desert regions and have received a great deal of attention regarding their life history responses to climate change in tropical and Mediterranean climate regions (Huxman et al, 2008; Huxman & Venable, 2013; Dwyer & Erickson, 2016; Mojzes et al, 2018). However, little is known about the ecology of desert winter annuals in temperate zones, which are characterized by cold and dry winters (Baskin & Baskin, 2014).…”