Skip to main content
bioRxiv
  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • ALERTS / RSS
Advanced Search
New Results

Behavioral flexibility and problem solving in an invasive bird

View ORCID ProfileCorina J. Logan
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/027706
Corina J. Logan
SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93103 USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • ORCID record for Corina J. Logan
  • For correspondence: cl417@cam.ac.uk
  • Abstract
  • Full Text
  • Info/History
  • Metrics
  • Supplementary material
  • Preview PDF
Loading

ABSTRACT

Behavioral flexibility is considered an important trait for adapting to environmental change, but it is unclear what it is, how it works, and whether it is a problem solving ability. I investigated behavioral flexibility and problem solving abilities experimentally in great-tailed grackles, an invasive species and thus a likely candidate for possessing behavioral flexibility. I found that grackles are behaviorally flexible and good problem solvers, they vary in behavioral flexibility across contexts, flexibility did not correlate with problem solving ability, and those that are more flexible did not necessarily use more learning strategies. It appears that behavioral flexibility can be an independent trait that varies across contexts. Maintaining such a high level of variation could be a mechanism underlying successful species invasions. These results highlight the need to investigate how individuals use behavior to react to changing environments.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
Back to top
PreviousNext
Posted March 02, 2016.
Download PDF

Supplementary Material

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Behavioral flexibility and problem solving in an invasive bird
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from bioRxiv
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the bioRxiv website.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Share
Behavioral flexibility and problem solving in an invasive bird
Corina J. Logan
bioRxiv 027706; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/027706
Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo LinkedIn logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Behavioral flexibility and problem solving in an invasive bird
Corina J. Logan
bioRxiv 027706; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/027706

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Subject Area

  • Animal Behavior and Cognition
Subject Areas
All Articles
  • Animal Behavior and Cognition (4667)
  • Biochemistry (10330)
  • Bioengineering (7650)
  • Bioinformatics (26277)
  • Biophysics (13495)
  • Cancer Biology (10663)
  • Cell Biology (15388)
  • Clinical Trials (138)
  • Developmental Biology (8477)
  • Ecology (12797)
  • Epidemiology (2067)
  • Evolutionary Biology (16816)
  • Genetics (11377)
  • Genomics (15448)
  • Immunology (10591)
  • Microbiology (25135)
  • Molecular Biology (10185)
  • Neuroscience (54304)
  • Paleontology (399)
  • Pathology (1663)
  • Pharmacology and Toxicology (2889)
  • Physiology (4331)
  • Plant Biology (9223)
  • Scientific Communication and Education (1585)
  • Synthetic Biology (2551)
  • Systems Biology (6768)
  • Zoology (1459)