Individual variation in asocial and social behavioural traits can affect patterns of social association. Resultant individual-level variation in sociality can be quantified using social network analysis. Social network analysis has recently been applied to the study of the evolution and development of social behaviour. Though captive systems have provided useful contributions to this endeavour, investigating the factors shaping social structure in wild populations affords superior ecological relevance. The characterisation of the social structure of wild animals has been greatly aided by improvements in automated data collection methods, particularly the miniaturisation of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for the purposes of studying the social foraging behaviour of wild birds. In this thesis, I use RFID methods to examine the factors influencing between-individual variation in foraging routines (Chapter Two) and social network position (Chapter Three) in wild populations of a colonial corvid species, the jackdaw (Corvus monedula). I then relate social network position to reproductive success (Chapter Three) and investigate the developmental plasticity of jackdaw social behaviour by determining the effect of early life conditions on social network position (Chapter Four). Finally, I describe the fine-scale temporal dynamics of social foraging, the nature of accompaniment during paired foraging and the foraging benefits of social support (Chapter Five).

The BIRD protein JACKDAW (JKD) belong to the INDETERMINATE DOMAIN (IDD) protein family shown to regulate many developmental processes in plants. JKD encodes a Zinc Finger Protein expressed in the root ground tissue and regulates root patterning in Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis). Recent and unpublished study indicates that JKD is involved in plant defense response in Arabidopsis. Here we study the JKD function in tomato plants (Solanum lycopersicum). We analyzed the tomato JKD orthologues (Solyc09g007550 (Solyc09) and Solyc10g084180 (Solyc10)) mutant lines, which were generated by Crispr-Cas and TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions in Genomes). Our data indicate that, like in Arabidopsis, Solyc09 controls root ground tissue patterning; the mutant lines show extra cell division in the inner cortex and disturbed stem cell patterning. In addition, we found that both Solyc09 and Solyc10 control the root and stem thickness and regulate tomato leaf shape. To further investigate whether Solyc09 and Solyc10 have a function in tomato when subjected to biotic stress, we evaluated the mutants response to the necrotrophic fungi Botrytis cinerea. We found that the tomato bird mutants have less infection when compared to the control. Taken together our data show that Solyc09 and Solyc10 genes play an essential role in tomato root, shoot development, and in plant immune response to the pathogenic fungi.

Social intelligence is thought to have evolved as an adaptation to the complex situations group-living animals encounter in their daily lives. High levels of sociality provide individuals with opportunities to learn from one another. Social learning provides individuals with a relatively cheap and quick alternative to individual learning. This thesis investigated social learning in three corvid species: gregarious rooks (Corvus frugilegus) and jackdaws (Corvus monedula) and nongregarious, territorial Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius). In addition to that, the species' social structure was analysed and individual differences between members of each species were determined. Introducing the field of social learning research, I presented a new framework for investigating social learning, combining ecology, ethology and evolution. Experiments were conducted within that framework. I found that rooks and jackdaws develop social bonds and dominance hierarchies, whereas Eurasian jays do not. This is most likely related to their territoriality. In two experiments using two-action tasks, jackdaws learned socially. The underlying social learning mechanism was enhancement, which fits in with their feeding ecology. Rooks did not show social learning when presented with videos of conspecifics opening an apparatus. This might have been due to the difficulty of transferring information from videos or due to an ingrained 'affinity' to innovation and/or rapid trial-and-error learning overriding social learning processes. Individual differences along the bold/shy axis existed in all three species, but they were not stable across contexts. Thus, it seemed that the individuals perceived the two seemingly similar contexts that were designed to investigate neophobia and exploration (novel object in familiar environment; novel environment) as two different situations. The information may therefore have been processed by two distinct underlying mechanisms, which elicited different responses in each of the contexts. The implications of the findings of this thesis are discussed with regard to the new framework, integrating sociality, social learning and individual differences with the species' ecology.