OXFORD, England — Birds choose like-minded nest neighbors in the woods very similarly to how humans would go about choosing a compatible personality type for a roommate, a new study on wild great tits finds.
Researchers at Oxford University analyzed the social network structure of wild great tits (Parus major) over six breeding seasons and discovered that the males — but not the females — were very selective in their choices for next neighbors. The new study finds that male great tits are quite selective when it comes to choosing birds to surround themselves with near their nests.
“We found that males, but not females, were picky about personalities, with males opting for like-minded neighbors,” says study co-author and doctoral student Katerina Johnson of Oxford in a university news release. “Our results emphasize that social interactions may play a key role in animal decisions.”
Male great tits chose to associate with similarly-behaved males in what the researchers say is a move to defend their territories when aggression among the birds is at its peak during breeding season. Looking for opportunities to mate with female great tits, less aggressive males look to avoid nesting next to bolder and more aggressive males. On the other hand, female birds were more likely to choose their nesting location based on the attractive qualities of the male birds in the area.
“Just like students choosing their flatmates,” Johnson adds, “birds may pay more attention to who they share their living space with than simply location. Animal personalities can influence their social organization and humans are likewise known to form social networks based on shared attributes including personality.”
The researchers tested the personality traits of great tits by introducing a novel environment and analyzing how the birds respond. This is similar to humans’ individual behavior differences that remain consistent over long periods of time and throughout various situations. The bolder great tits were more likely to actively explore their new surroundings while the shier birds were more inhibited.
“This novel research finding may also help explain the evolution of personality and why individuals in a population differ in their behavior,” says Johnson. “Rather than one particular personality type being favored by natural selection as ‘the best,’ different behavioral strategies may be equally good depending on who you choose to be your friends and neighbors.”
The researchers suggest that by nesting closer to birds with similar personality traits, the birds’ chances for survival increase. Having aggressive neighbors could result in more fights between the males, but they may be able to come together to defend their nesting area from intruders.
This study was published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
Did you ever think it was simply because non-aggressive males physically weren’t able to live near aggressive males without being chased off and it was not a conscious decision at all?
Teachable lesson: always best to nest with a set of great tits!
And they’re the bird brains???
Nah, too easy.
My version of the story includes a advertisement featuring a girl,
with great tits, lifting weights.
I object to the use of the term “great tits” in the above article and protest in the most emphatic manner.
Monty Python
Too late, someone said it long ago: Birds of a feather, flock together…..and science cannot disprove it. Same thing with humans too and it’s a damned shame the Fed forces us down each others’ throats in the name of God, the Union, diversity or whatever else they figure is BS enough to convince us that we can all get along. Simple truth is….we can’t, we do not and we never will.
John Irwin, something else that the level-peggers on the Left fail to grasp, past is prologue. If, as you rightly say, the different races have never gotten along, do not now get along, and never will, then we can without risk conjecture that such egregious irrationality as importing millions of swarthy, monotonously black-headed, intellectually marginal Africans, Asians, and Arabs into the indigenous white Europeans’ ancestral lands and then stubbornly attempting to enforce coercive measures to make them get along is driven by an Ulterior Psychological Motive.
Leftists are demon-possessed liars and lovers of lies. An observation commonly attributed to Einstein is that doing the same thing over and over again expecting to get a different result is a working definition of insanity. Leftists are afflicted with borderline mental illness. The more their level-pegging agenda fails the tighter their grip on it. B. Hussein Obama, that nappy-headed nincompoop, and his female minion H. Rodham Clinton, should have been locked up in an asylum. Instead, they were allowed to run loose wreaking havoc all over the world. We need to sterilize leftists so they can’t multiply and replenish the Earth with their defective kind.
I’m serious about referring to leftists as inherently defective human beings. Recent research at Nebraska and Texas, Austin informs us that leftists are unable to decipher simple perceptual distinctions, as revealed in their performing poorly on embedded image tests, which tests rightists sail through with colors flying. The difference is inborn, a manifestation of two different inborn cognitive styles that cannot be changed, which explains the frustration of trying to pound facts and logic into leftists’ hard heads. Leftists are congenitally unfit to deal with the facts of human reality. I long ago ceased wasting my time talking to them.
I conjecture that leftists’ inability to decipher simple perceptual distinctions is related to their being unable to decipher complex moral distinctions, which explains their social agenda manifesting a penchant for blurring them, as between white and black, male and female, rich and poor, producer and parasite, and so on.
Jefferson first noticed a difference between the inborn psychology of these two types of men that correlated with their political orientation Left and Right. The aforementioned recent research has validated his insight.
Machiavelli agreed.
Birds of a feather flock together. This has been known for centuries. We tax payers didn’t pay for this study, did we?
Probably “your tax dollars at play”.
Gotta love it.
How in the heck do these studies get published.
I’m told feral cats around these birds have related to this researcher that such birds displaying this behavior are the tastier ones.
And because they are the more PC members of the flock don’t want to offend the other birds and such pacificity makes them easier to catch…
I’m sure this researcher will soon publish an article how feral cats victimize birds who “just want to get along” and wear a t shirt printed with, “Bird Lives Matter”…
Wild Great Tits. Love that name! Thats what we called one of my sorority sisters.
Do you suppose there are any “Tame Great Tits” ? Or are there only wild ones ?
I am personally aware of 2.
So now we know why all the yellow-bellied nitwits flock to San Francisco and Berkeley!
And all this wasted time and money moves society forward how exactly???
There’s an add in the sidebar for some dating service with a young woman in the thumbnail sporting great tits.
How much did this study cost and my nursery rhyme book from 1700 says, “Birds of a feather, flock together.” Why can’t we learn from the past and save the study money?
That’s racist.
Great tits, lol….
Theodore Barber, PhD, Harvard, THE HUMAN NATURE OF BIRDS
THE PRICE OF ALTRUISM by George Price
Birds off the tether fly together.
You say he’s a bunting?
Well there goes the neighborhood.