Behavioral flexibility is related to foraging, but not social or habitat use behaviors, in a species that is rapidly expanding its range
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Abstract
The ability of other species to adapt to human modified environments is increasingly crucial because of the rapid expansion of this landscape type. Behavioral flexibility, the ability to change behavior in the face of a changing environment by packaging information and making it available to other cognitive processes, is hypothesized to be a key factor in a species’ ability to successfully adapt to new environments, including human modified environments, and expand its geographic range. However, most tests of this hypothesis confound behavioral flexibility with the specific proxy aspect of foraging, social, or habitat use behavior that was feasible to measure. This severely limits the power of predictions about whether and how a species uses flexibility to adapt behavior to new environments. To begin to resolve this issue, we directly tested flexibility using two measures (reversal learning and puzzlebox solution switching) and investigated its relationship with foraging, social, and habitat use behaviors in a flexible species that is rapidly expanding its geographic range: the great-tailed grackle. We found relationships between flexibility and foraging breadth and foraging techniques, with the less flexible individuals using a higher proportion of human foods and having more human food sources within their home range, suggesting that they specialize on human foods. These relationships were only detectable after a flexibility manipulation where some individuals were trained to be more flexible via serial reversal learning and compared with control individuals who were not, but not when using data from outside of the flexibility manipulation. There were no strong relationships between flexibility and social or habitat use behaviors. Given that this species is rapidly expanding its geographic range and recently shifting more toward urban and arid environments, our findings could suggest that foraging breadth and foraging technique breadth are factors in facilitating such an expansion. Overall, this evidence indicates that cross-species correlations between flexibility and foraging, social, and habitat use behaviors based on proxies have a high degree of uncertainty, resulting in an insufficient ability to draw conclusions.
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Behavioral flexibility (i.e., the ability of some animal species to adapt their actions to new conditions) is a feature that may be critical for the local persistence and, therefore, the geographic distribution of many animal species in our fast-changing world. However, most studies have measured it using different aspects of foraging, social or habitat use behavior as proxies, lacking an empirical demonstration of the relationship between behavioral flexibility and these variables (e.g., Sol et al. 2002). In this study, Corina Logan and co-authors (Logan et al. 2025) undertake a set of well-described experiments that start using two methods (i.e., reversal learning of a color preference and a multiaccess box study weather behavioral flexibility) to measure the behavioral flexibility of great-tailed grackles, a species that is rapidly …
Behavioral flexibility (i.e., the ability of some animal species to adapt their actions to new conditions) is a feature that may be critical for the local persistence and, therefore, the geographic distribution of many animal species in our fast-changing world. However, most studies have measured it using different aspects of foraging, social or habitat use behavior as proxies, lacking an empirical demonstration of the relationship between behavioral flexibility and these variables (e.g., Sol et al. 2002). In this study, Corina Logan and co-authors (Logan et al. 2025) undertake a set of well-described experiments that start using two methods (i.e., reversal learning of a color preference and a multiaccess box study weather behavioral flexibility) to measure the behavioral flexibility of great-tailed grackles, a species that is rapidly expanding its geographic range. The grackles are then released to the wild and their foraging, social or habitat use behaviors are measured and compared to those of wild unmanipulated individuals.
This experimental setup allowed the authors to test several hypotheses and predictions on the relationship between behavioral flexibility and foraging, social or habitat use behaviors. The results of the study are of great interest for those using different proxies of behavioral flexibility, as number of foraging habitats and techniques, because the relationships are not as expected, finding positive, negative and no relationships depending on the flexibility measure and the sex of the bird. Interestingly, they find that the less flexible individuals are those that use more human foods. Sociality and habitat use showed mostly no association with behavioral flexibility. They also find a new variable that can be used to measure behavioral flexibility using focal observations, without the need of controlled experiments (i.e., switching among different foraging techniques).
This study is part of a preregistered project (Astegiano and Sebastían González, 2019; Logan et al., 2019), and thus all the steps taken during the research had already been published and any deviation from the pre-registration has carefully been explained, being a great example of transparency and reproducibility. The study also highlights the importance of manipulative experiments to test this type of behavioral hypotheses, as some variables used as proxies does not seem to work under all circumstances.
References
Astegiano, J, Sebastián González, E (2019) Understanding geographic range expansions in human-dominated landscapes: does behavioral flexibility modulate flexibility in foraging and social behavior?. Peer Community in Ecology, 100026. https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.ecology.100026
Logan CJ, McCune K, Bergeron L, Folsom M, Lukas D (2019). Is behavioral flexibility related to foraging and social behavior in a rapidly expanding species? Recommended by Peer Community In Ecology. http://corinalogan.com/Preregistrations/g_flexforaging.html
Logan CJ, Lukas D, Geng X, Hardy K, LeGrande C, Marfori Z, MacPherson M, Rowney C, Smith C, McCune KB (2025) Behavioral flexibility is related to foraging, but not social or habitat use behaviors, in a species that is rapidly expanding its range. EcoEvoRxiv, ver.3 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Ecology https://doi.org/10.32942/X2T036
Sol, D., Timmermans, S., & Lefebvre, L. (2002). Behavioural flexibility and invasion success in birds. Animal Behaviour, 63(3), 495–502. https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.2001.1953 -