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Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?

Many animals emit calls in the presence of food, but researchers do not always know the function of these calls. Evidence suggests that adult golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia) use food-offering calls to teach juveniles which substrate (i.e., microhabitat) to forage on, or in, for food. H...

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Autores principales: Troisi, Camille A., Hoppitt, Will J. E., Ruiz-Miranda, Carlos R., Laland, Kevin N.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6300579/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30613117
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10764-018-0069-z
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author Troisi, Camille A.
Hoppitt, Will J. E.
Ruiz-Miranda, Carlos R.
Laland, Kevin N.
author_facet Troisi, Camille A.
Hoppitt, Will J. E.
Ruiz-Miranda, Carlos R.
Laland, Kevin N.
author_sort Troisi, Camille A.
collection PubMed
description Many animals emit calls in the presence of food, but researchers do not always know the function of these calls. Evidence suggests that adult golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia) use food-offering calls to teach juveniles which substrate (i.e., microhabitat) to forage on, or in, for food. However, we do not yet know whether juveniles learn from this aspect of the adults’ behavior. Here we examine whether juveniles learn to associate food-offering calls with a foraging substrate, as a step toward assessing whether these calls qualify as teaching behavior. We compared the performance of four wild juvenile golden lion tamarins that were introduced to a novel substrate while exposed to playbacks of food-offering calls (experimental condition) to the performance of three juveniles that were exposed to the novel substrate without the presence of food-offering playbacks (control condition). We varied the location of the novel substrate between trials. We found that food-offering calls had an immediate effect on juveniles’ interactions with the novel substrate, whether they inserted their hands into the substrate and their eating behavior, and a long-term effect on eating behavior at the substrate. The findings imply that juvenile golden lion tamarins can learn through food-offering calls about the availability of food at a substrate, which is consistent with (but does not prove) teaching in golden lion tamarins through stimulus enhancement. Our findings support the hypothesis that teaching might be more likely to evolve in cooperatively breeding species with complex ecological niches. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10764-018-0069-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-63005792019-01-04 Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior? Troisi, Camille A. Hoppitt, Will J. E. Ruiz-Miranda, Carlos R. Laland, Kevin N. Int J Primatol Article Many animals emit calls in the presence of food, but researchers do not always know the function of these calls. Evidence suggests that adult golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia) use food-offering calls to teach juveniles which substrate (i.e., microhabitat) to forage on, or in, for food. However, we do not yet know whether juveniles learn from this aspect of the adults’ behavior. Here we examine whether juveniles learn to associate food-offering calls with a foraging substrate, as a step toward assessing whether these calls qualify as teaching behavior. We compared the performance of four wild juvenile golden lion tamarins that were introduced to a novel substrate while exposed to playbacks of food-offering calls (experimental condition) to the performance of three juveniles that were exposed to the novel substrate without the presence of food-offering playbacks (control condition). We varied the location of the novel substrate between trials. We found that food-offering calls had an immediate effect on juveniles’ interactions with the novel substrate, whether they inserted their hands into the substrate and their eating behavior, and a long-term effect on eating behavior at the substrate. The findings imply that juvenile golden lion tamarins can learn through food-offering calls about the availability of food at a substrate, which is consistent with (but does not prove) teaching in golden lion tamarins through stimulus enhancement. Our findings support the hypothesis that teaching might be more likely to evolve in cooperatively breeding species with complex ecological niches. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s10764-018-0069-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Springer US 2018-11-21 2018 /pmc/articles/PMC6300579/ /pubmed/30613117 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10764-018-0069-z Text en © The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Troisi, Camille A.
Hoppitt, Will J. E.
Ruiz-Miranda, Carlos R.
Laland, Kevin N.
Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?
title Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?
title_full Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?
title_fullStr Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?
title_full_unstemmed Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?
title_short Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?
title_sort food-offering calls in wild golden lion tamarins (leontopithecus rosalia): evidence for teaching behavior?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6300579/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30613117
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10764-018-0069-z
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