How hungry birds use social networking to survive

The Marsh Tit is one of the birds in the study that used social
networking skills to find new food sources.

SCIENTISTS have discovered that humans aren’t the only ones who find out about the hottest new grazing spots via social networking.

The birds, they’re into it too. Namely blue tits, great tits and marsh tits.

No, filthy buggers, that’s not some kind of pun. Tits are a breed of bird that can mostly be found in the UK and Europe.

Researchers from the Australian National University in Canberra and Oxford University discovered that the birds used social networking to communicate about new food locations.

The birds were equipped with tags to monitor their activity and the scientists built sunflower feeders in four small areas across two sites of woodland near Oxfordshire, known as Higgins Copse and Cammoor, and fitted them with antennae.



Between December 2010 and January last year in winter the researchers placed feeders in set locations well-known to the birds, measuring their patterns of associations in the feeding flocks, their "social-network".

They recorded 7790 separate food visits at Higgins Corpse and 11,866 visits at Cammoor, with 81 and 68 different birds.

After this data-collection period a single feeder was installed at a location that was not known for its food resources, so that no bird would have any pre-existing knowledge of the site.

They then recorded who discovered these new feeders, and in what order. They repeated the experiment several times at in each woodland area.

Much like on Facebook, the scientists found that birds “in the know” that were more connected to the social network, were more likely to find new food sites than those on the “periphery”.

The less socially connected birds would just have to go hungry.

“It has parallels with social networking sites like Facebook (or indeed with the friendship networks humans maintain in everyday life) in that having lots of friends from many different groups means that a person potentially has access to more information from lots of diverse sources,” lead researcher from the Australian National University, Lucy Aplin told News Limited.

-  News Limited Network