Social learning is a topic of many studies. We tested the effect of social learning on the acquisition of avoidance against aposematic prey. We have chosen wild-caught adult and naive hand-reared juvenile great tits (Parus major) as a model predator species, because their individual avoidance learnig of aposematic prey is well-studied. We used red and green paper dummies of bugs with a mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) stuck underneath as an artificial prey. Mealworms were soaked in water or in bitter-tasting solution of quinine. We used two types of conspecific demonstrators - naive birds that showed aversive reactions while tasting an unpalatable prey and experienced birds that were trained not to handle the unpalatable pray at all. We compared effects of both demonstrators on discrimination learning and we tested whether these effects differ in adult and juvenile birds. Observing an experienced demonstrator had an effect on the performance of observers at the beginning of learning process. The observers did not reject the unpalatable prey completely, but the number of trials in which they correctly chose the palatable prey was higher in comparison with birds that observed naive demonstrators and birds from the control group with no demonstrator. Latencies to handle the unpalatable prey in the first...
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:388367 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Bělová, Magdalena |
| Contributors | Exnerová, Alice, Sedláček, František |
| Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
| Language | Czech |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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