Food Search and Consumption and its Relation to Aggressive Responses in Pigeons.

Abstract

The aim of this experiment was to describe the relation between the emission and reception of aggressive responses, as well as the occurrence of food discovery and consumption responses in a social foraging situation in which the spatial distribution of food was varied. During five sessions, groups of pigeons (n=5) were exposed to a wood platform with 12 sealed containers, of which 4 contained food (full). For the Proximal Group the full containers were spatially adjacent to one another and for the Distal Group the containers were spatially separated. In each group only one subject discovered food consistently, but all of the members consumed food. The aggressive responses were higher in subjects that consumed less food and the reception of aggressive responses was higher for subjects that consumed more food. The data were analyzed in terms of the Hawk/Dove game described by Sirot (2000).