RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Females facilitate male patch discovery in a wild fish population
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 478537
DO 10.1101/478537
A1 Lysanne Snijders
A1 Ralf H. J. M. Kurvers
A1 Stefan Krause
A1 Alan N. Tump
A1 Indar W. Ramnarine
A1 Jens Krause
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/27/478537.abstract
AB When individuals are more socially responsive to one sex than the other, the benefits they get from foraging socially are likely to depend on the sex composition of the social environment. We tested this hypothesis by performing experimental manipulations of guppy, Poecilia reticulata, sex compositions in the wild. Males found fewer novel food patches in the absence of females than in mixed-sex compositions, while female patch discovery did not differ between compositions. We argue that these results were driven by sex-dependent mechanisms of social association: Markov chain-based fission-fusion modeling revealed that males reduced sociality when females were absent, while less social individuals found fewer patches. Females were similarly social with or without males. Finally, males, but not females, preferred to join females over males at patches. Our findings reveal the relevance of considering how individual and population-level traits interact in shaping the adaptive value of social living in the wild.