How do black-capped chickadees value visual versus acoustic cues of predation risk?

• Author / Creator

  Arteaga Torres, Josue

• Animals must assess the risk of mortality due to starvation or predation when making foraging decisions. This decision-making can be guided by cues from the environment, conspecifics, heterospecifics, or by predators themselves. Information theory predicts that high certainty cues should be valued more than low certainty cues, and that two cues presented together could elicit a synergistic, additive or redundant effect depending on whether multiple cues provide greater certainty. We measured the latency of black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) to resume feeding (i.e., foraging boldness) during winter in response to different cues of predation risk: visual (merlin mount, an important predator of chickadees) and acoustic cues (conspecific mobbing calls), presented alone and in combination. As predicted, chickadees took longer to resume feeding after a visual, high certainty, cue than an acoustic, low certainty, cue. Presenting both cues simultaneously produced the same foraging delay as the visual cue alone suggesting that the acoustic cue did not provide additional information beyond that provided by the visual cue. Furthermore, under high risk of starvation (lower temperatures), chickadees resumed feeding faster following predator cues. This pattern was more evident for low certainty than high certainty cues, demonstrating the importance of the uncertainty in mediating decision-making in food-safety trade-offs.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Black-capped chickadees
  • Information theory
  • Risk-taking behaviour
  • Foraging behaviour
  • Cue uncertainty

• Graduation date

  Spring 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-fcx7-2406

• License

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