Human-altered landscapes can present wildlife with both risks and new feeding opportunities in the form of anthropogenic resources. Individual animals often vary in behavioural traits that influence how they interact with novel environments. This study sought to clarify how variation in two behavioural types — boldness and sociability — affects the sequence of stages required to use anthropogenic resources: discovery of a resource, solving a task to access it, and overall performance in exploiting it. The focal species was the California ground squirrel (Otospermophilus beecheyi), studied in two wild populations that differ in typical human exposure and availability of anthropogenic food.
The authors used fully automated foraging puzzles to present a novel, manipulable resource to wild squirrels. This approach allowed objective measurement of the timing and success of interactions with the puzzle across multiple individuals. The automated setup recorded when individuals discovered the resource, latency to solve the task, and measures of overall performance. Two populations were compared: a recreational-use population with regular human presence and anthropogenic food available, and a trail-use population where human encounters were more transient and anthropogenic food was absent. Further methodological details, including the experimental apparatus and data/code, were reported by the authors and are available via their repository.
Two focal behavioural axes were evaluated. Boldness was treated as a trait expected to influence willingness to approach and interact with novel stimuli, potentially affecting the initial discovery and engagement with anthropogenic resources. Sociability was assessed as the tendency to be near or interact with conspecifics and was hypothesized to affect opportunities for observational learning and information use. The experiment quantified how these traits related to three specific outcomes: discovery latency, problem-solving latency, and overall performance at the foraging puzzle.
Across the measures reported, boldness consistently predicted better outcomes at multiple stages. Bolder individuals discovered the resource earlier than shyer individuals, solved the task more quickly, and achieved higher overall performance on the task. These results indicate that boldness promotes efficient exploitation of anthropogenic resources across discovery and handling stages.
Sociability influenced problem-solving speed: individuals with higher sociability, and those with more opportunities to observe conspecifics solving the task, displayed faster problem-solving latencies. This pattern is consistent with observational learning facilitating quicker acquisition of the necessary actions to access the resource.
Population context influenced discovery but not later stages of exploitation. Individuals from the recreational-use population — where squirrels experience regular human presence and access to anthropogenic food — were faster to discover the automated foraging puzzle than individuals from the trail-use population, which experiences only transient human exposure and no anthropogenic food. In contrast, measures of problem-solving latency and overall performance were similar between populations. The authors also found that greater opportunity to observe conspecifics solving the task was associated with faster problem-solving, supporting a role for social information use in acquiring task solutions.
The findings demonstrate that individual variation in behavioural type, especially boldness, can drive success in exploiting anthropogenic resources by affecting multiple stages of the process: discovery, problem-solving, and performance. Sociability contributes by enhancing access to social information and thereby accelerating problem-solving, consistent with observational learning. The observed population difference in discovery timing suggests that prior exposure to humans and anthropogenic food can shift how quickly individuals detect and engage with novel human-provided resources. Together, these results provide a mechanistic understanding of how behavioural plasticity and individual differences influence wildlife responses to human-altered environments.
This report summarizes the outcomes presented in the authors' abstract and accompanying article information. Specific experimental details, statistical analyses, sample sizes, and effect sizes were provided in the full preprint and supplementary materials; if not reported in the summary, those details must be consulted directly in the source. The authors declared no competing interests. Funding for the research included the Swiss National Science Foundation (P500PB_210994), the Vicki Lord Larson and James Larson Tenure-track Time Reassignment Collaborative Research Program, the American Society of Mammalogists, and Save Mount Diablo. The authors also provided a GitHub repository referenced in the article for data and code access.