Social learning of a novel foraging patch in families of free-living Florida scrub-jays

Free-living juvenile Florida scrub-jays, Aphelocoma coerulescens, learned to forage in a novel patch (the centre of a ring) when in proximity to other family members that foraged successfully. We were able to distinguish the contributions of social learning and of individual learning, and to show that social learning occurred. The foraging task required individual jays to dig for peanut bits (chopped fragments) buried in sand in the centre of a 33-cm plastic ring. Jays were trained in their family groups to perform the task during a summer season, and were allowed to perform the task in the presence of juveniles (aged 40–85 days) in later years. Jays living in 18 control families received partial exposure to the training situation, but received no exposure to the ring before being presented with the task in the presence of their young. Juveniles in 16 families with trained jays were able to witness demonstrations and to scrounge peanut pieces from the models as they completed the task. These 41 juveniles learned more of the task than the 33 juveniles in control families. Seven juvenile jays and two older, nonbreeding jays in the trained families completed the task at least once, whereas no jays in control families completed the task. A modified task that prevented snatching also prevented transmission of the complete task, although the 22 juveniles that observed the modified task learned more of the task than the 33 control juveniles. Further analysis indicated that demonstrations had their greatest effect in increasing the probability that juveniles would enter the ring.