| dc.description.abstract | Group-living animals benefit from their access to social information as it allows them to circumvent the potential costs of collecting information asocially, thereby expediting their learning to overcome novel challenges. Making use of social information is not universally adaptive however, and there is evidence that animals employ strategies that determine ‘when’ they should use social information and ‘whose’ information they should use. Such strategies have been widely studied in a variety of species. However, research into social learning strategies in otters (subfamily Lutrinae), a taxon known to engage in social foraging and cooperative predator defence behaviour, has been limited. In this thesis, I use network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) to investigate the strategies by which one of the most social otter species, the Asian short-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus), uses social information when learning how to overcome novel extractive foraging challenges and when deciding how to respond to novel predator threats. Specifically, in Chapter 2 I provide evidence that captive otters use a combination of social and asocial information when learning to extract their regular food from a series of novel foraging tasks, and that these otters remember the solutions to these tasks months later. In Chapter 3, I present evidence that captive otters naïve to their natural hard-shelled prey, again use a combination of social and asocial information when learning to extract the meat from such prey items. I then compare the time it took otters to extract the meat from these prey items to how long it took them to solve the tasks presented in Chapter 2, and show that they overcome mechanistically novel extractive challenges faster when the reward within is familiar. In Chapter 4, I describe the behaviours that captive otters display towards novel stimuli resembling three predatory species and a non-threatening control. I then provide evidence that otters become more likely to participate in these behaviours when more of their group mates do so, and that they change the intensity of these displays depending on the stimulus presented. In Chapter 5, I present evidence that otters use social information when deciding how to respond to the predator stimuli presented in Chapter 4, and that they rely on information provided by their close associates when deciding to interact with stimuli. The findings presented in this thesis provide first insight into the strategies by which Asian
short-clawed otters use social information in both learning and decision making contexts. I propose that such insights are useful for informing the development of pre-release training programmes as part of future reintroductions for the conservation of this ‘Vulnerable’ species. | en_GB |
