Authors: Ernő Vincze Sándor Papp Bálint Preiszner Gábor Seress András Liker Veronika Bókony
Publish Date: 2014/08/28
Volume: 18, Issue: 1, Pages: 291-298
Abstract
Wild animals living in proximity to humans may benefit from recognizing people individually and adjusting their behaviour to the potential risk or gain expected from each person Although several urbandwelling species exhibit such skills it is unclear whether this is due to preexisting advanced cognitive abilities of taxa predisposed for city life or arises specifically in urban populations either by selection or through ontogenetic changes facilitated by exposure to humans To test these alternatives we studied populations of house sparrows Passer domesticus along the urbanization gradient We manipulated the birds’ experience hostile or not associated with humans with different faces masks and measured their behavioural responses to the proximity of each person Contrary to our expectations we found that while rural birds showed less fear of the nonhostile than of the hostile or an unfamiliar person urban birds made no distinction These results indicate that house sparrows are less able to recognize individual humans or less willing to behaviourally respond to them in more urbanized habitats with high human population density We propose several mechanisms that may explain this difference including reduced payoff of discrimination due to a low chance of repeated interactions with city people or a higher likelihood that city people will ignore themWe thank András Péter for providing Solomon Coder Birds were housed at Veszprém Zoo The research was financed by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund OTKA K84132 During the study AL was supported by a Marie Curie IntraEuropean Fellowship During the preparation of the manuscript we were supported by the European Union with the cofunding of the European Social Fund SP BP and EV by TÁMOP422A11/1/KONV20120064 and VB by TÁMOP424A/211/120120001 ‘National Excellence Program’
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