Social learning in foraging guppies, Poecilia reticulata

Gopika, B. (2019) Social learning in foraging guppies, Poecilia reticulata. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

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Abstract

Social learning is a widespread phenomenon which helps animals obtain information from others. In this study, male and female guppies were compared for performance in a two-choice foraging task either as an all naïve group of four individuals or as a group of two naïve individuals (observers) and two experienced individuals (demonstrators). The performance of the individuals in a naïve group and the observers was tracked across six continuous days in terms of latency to reach the reward chamber (of a particular color, and marked with a landmark) and the first choice made. Observers were expected to perform better since they had access to social information via the experienced conspecifics. However, they did not perform better than individuals in a group of all naïve individuals. This could possibly be because of competitive exclusion by demonstrators, or the demonstrators being overly fast. Guppies were also tested for the same task as single individuals. No sex difference was observed in performance of the task, either in the social learning or individual learning experiments.

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