Nature 329, 239 - 241 (17 September 1987); doi:10.1038/329239a0

Individuals in an osprey colony discriminate between high and low quality information

Erick Greene

Department of Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA

A potential benefit of living in a colony is that animals may gain information about the location of good foraging sites from other colony members^1–3. The role of information transfer as a major benefit favouring the evolution of coloniality is, however, very poorly understood⁴. Information transfer has been demonstrated for only a few colonial vertebrate species^5–7, but not all colonial species share information^8–10. Here I report that colonial ospreys (Pandion haliaetus, L.) not only transfer information about foraging locations, but that they discriminate among fish species brought back by other colony members, and respond only to schooling prey species. This information significantly reduces the search times needed for informed birds to capture patchily-distributed prey species. This is the first demonstration of a colonial vertebrate discriminating between prey species with different spatial distributions brought back by returning foragers, and selectively using information about location of prey species to increase foraging efficiency.

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