Oh, brothers and sisters. These special relationship can be filled with everything from fun and joy to cruel pranks and teasing. Observing each other's childhoods and exchanging information about their parents, as well as family secrets and advice, makes this relationship truly unlike any other.
This connection is also not unique to our species, according to new research published today in the journal PLOS Biology. Among some birdssiblings can be powerful role models that can even eclipse parental influence.
“Most of our knowledge about juvenile social learning comes from species with long periods of parental care, including humans.” Study co-author and behavioral ecologist Sonya Wilde said in a statement. “Most learning comes from parents because children and parents spend so much time together. But what happens to the transfer of knowledge when parental care is limited?”
I would like to solve a puzzle
The team used a songbird Parus Major commonly known as the great titlike their model look. They observed that siblings and other adults can become critical sources of learning when mom and dad are not in that role. This alternative learning path may explain some of the behavioral similarities in bird families that involve parents.
“When they leave the nest, they don’t know anything,” Wild said of the species. “They can't feed themselves or find shelter. All they have is about 10 days of parental care to figure it all out. The offspring would like to extend that time. They follow their parents and keep begging, but the parents are exhausted and start to retreat. So the selection pressure is very strong on the offspring to quickly figure out how to find food on their own.”
To learn more about these social learning strategies, the team presented 51 breeding pairs and their 229 newly fledged offspring. with feeding puzzles for 10 weeks. In puzzles, sliding the door to the left or right revealed delicious tray with mealworms. Using these fully automated puzzle boxes allowed the team to collect “tens of thousands of solutions” that helped them make connections and patterns in the young birds' learning and decision-making strategies as they became more independent, Wild said.
Chewing on 72 Pounds of Mealworms
After 10 weeks of observing the birds' problem-solving behavior, they found that birds were more likely to learn to solve puzzles if they had parents who were also problem-solvers. However, the problem-solving strategies of young birds were actually more greatly influenced the way their siblings and the non-parental adults around them solved the puzzle.
Of the newcomers in each sibling group, about 75 percent learned from adults who were not their biological parents, and about 25 percent learned from their parents. Of the remaining students in each group, about 94 percent learned to solve the puzzle with the help of their siblings..
Going into the study, the team wasn't entirely sure whether the teenagers would even be able to learn to solve the puzzle, but they quickly realized how eager they were to participate in the experiments. They've passed about 72 pounds of mealworms in just a few weeks.
[ Related: Baby orangutans spy on mom to build cozy treehouse nests. ]
Looking at animal cultures
According to the teamUnderstanding even small animal behavior like this can be valuable for understanding biodiversity and wildlife. conservation.
“The more diverse animal cultures are, the more resilient populations are to extinction and able to cope with environmental fluctuations,” Wild said. “Such species are less vulnerable because they have many different role models from which to draw cultural and social information.”
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