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| Asocial Testing of Social Species: Stress-testing the Ecological Validity of Our Behavior�Assays |
| Scott A Benson. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, United States |
Presence of groupmates is the ecologically valid condition in virtually every behavioral context for many species. While teasing apart individual differences in noisy group contexts may be difficult - groupmates frequently and dynamically influence each others' behavior - some perhaps overlooked research suggests we may be limiting our understanding of natural individual differences for the sake of convenience. Isolation may even cause an additional and unique stressor in highly social species, placing a new interpretation on some old behavioral data. Presented here are repeated calls to consider the effects of isolated contexts from researchers spanning broad taxa, as well as new empirical data on the results of isolated vs social versions of a novel environment test for Tufted titmice (Baeolophus bicolor) and Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis). |