Innovative problem solving in birds: a key role of motor diversity

Foraging innovations are increasingly viewed as a key source of phenotypic plasticity and evolutionary change. Often thought to be associated with increased cognitive abilities, innovative foraging behaviour could potentially emerge as a simple consequence of being able to use a greater variety of motor actions in the foraging context. Here, we explored the role of motor diversity in the innovative problem-solving abilities of a highly successful ecological invader, the Indian myna, Sturnus tristis, using an extractive foraging task with multiple compartments. Consistent with findings from several other species, persistence predicted the latency to solve the first compartment. However, motor diversity was the strongest predictor of both solving latency of all further compartments and number of compartments solved. We suggest that motor diversity may facilitate innovation by increasing the ways in which objects can be handled, which in turn would allow for associative learning processes to enhance the expression of successful foraging behaviours

Invading new environments: a mechanistic framework linking motor diversity and cognition to establishment success

To invade a new environment and become established all animals need to solve the same set of problems: First, they need to detect new resources and investigate them. Second, they need to develop the skills to exploit them and, third, store adequate information to be able to identify and handle them in the future. Fourth, they need to detect new predators and avoid them. Admittedly, the amplitude of these challenges will most likely vary with the degree of adaptive match between the invader and the new environment (Duncan et al., 2003; Sol, 2007). Invaders arriving from environments similar to their new surroundings benefit from their existing learned and evolutionary knowledge because the cues that signal resources in their new environment and the way new items need to be handled will bear some similarity to the cues they experienced and the skills they deployed in their original environment. The challenges are greatest for those invaders arriving from different environments because their existing knowledge will not apply to their new circumstances. But, overall, whatever their level of adaptive match, invaders confronted with unfamiliar surroundings and unfamiliar circumstances all face these problems to some extent. The question we address here is which behavioural and cognitive mechanisms assist alien animals in solving these challenges

Short-term changes in the structure of microbial communities following bare peat recolonization by Agrostis stolonifera and Eriophorum angustifolium.

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