The SOCIAL ZebRA FINCH project

The zebra finch project was established in 2016. It focuses on long-term tracking of individual social decisions in replicated colonies, to address questions about how social bonds form, how they are maintained, how they contribute to fitness, and how social systems emerge from the social decisions of colony members. The project was initially funded by a DFG grant Social Drivers of Extra-pair Paternity, and is now funded by the Centre for the Advanced Study for Collective Behaviour.

approaches

Phase 1: We established replicated colonies of zebra finches in large outdoor aviaries with naturalistic group sizes

where each bird was fitted with a backpack printed with a unique machine-readable code.

Using cameras fitted to Raspberry PIs, when then tracked birds in these aviaries from dawn until dusk across different contexts.

Birds were allowed to form pairs and reproduce

allowing us to gain unprecedented insights into fitness consequences of social decision-making

as well as to study of how fledglings subsequently interacted with adult colony-members.

Phase 2: We are now focussing on how social interactions shape physiology by studying colonies under more controlled conditions.

We track social behaviour and physiology simultaneously.

Linking the social component of physiological state with both individual-level and colony-level reproductive performance.