“This afternoon there is a worm snack in the branches of the pine tree opposite. Click on Like if you plan to attend.” This could be one of the events advertised on the wall of a great tit, (Published major), a very common bird in gardens and urban parks. Although it is clear that virtually no birds advertise their activities, a group of scientists at the University of Oxford has developed a technique to create a kind of ‘animal Facebook’ from more than a million observations of great tit.
“Facebook collects data on who your friends are, where you have been and what information you share with others”, explains Ioannis Psorakis, leader of the investigation. “We have shown that data from individual animals, in this case chickadees, can be analyzed to build a ‘Facebook for animals’ that tells uswho is allied with whom, who are the members of the same group, and which birds are regularly attending the same kinds of ‘events’“. The new technique has made it possible to obtain a good overview of the networks between individuals of the same species, to know who are ‘real friends’ beyond sporadic encounters, and to analyze various aspects such as the ability to find food or a mate and the sites visited. more frequently by animals.
The results, which are published in the journalJournal of the Royal Society Interface, indicate, for example, that the composition of a flock is not random, but that the birds select each other. Many of them forage for food with regular companions and also frequently interact with the individuals with whom they end up mating.
The new technique is being used to analyze thesocial connectionsamong other species of animals, and, combined with genetic information, will allow researchers to explore the genetic bases of sociability, explain why some individuals attract each other or define specific areas of the genome that determine the gregariousness of many animal species.
