A Eurasian jay. Image credit: Ljerka Ostojić (CC BY 4.0)
Eurasian jays, Garrulus glandarius, are members of the crow family. These large-brained birds hide food when it is abundant, and eat it later, when it is scarce. Previous studies have found that jays avoid theft by other jays by carefully deciding what food to hide, and where. In one study, they preferred to hide their food behind an opaque barrier, rather than a transparent one, when another jay was watching. In a second study, they preferred to hide food that the watching jay had already eaten enough of, and thus did not want.
These studies suggest that jays have flexible cognitive skills when it comes to protecting their food. They respond to whether a potential thief can see their hiding place and to how much a thief might want the food they are stashing. The next question is, can Eurasian jays combine these two pieces of information? For example, if a jay has two types of food they could hide when another jay is present, but only has one place to hide them (either in view or out-of-view of the other jay), does the first jay prefer to stash the food that the second jay has already eaten, and therefore does not want anymore, only when the hiding place is visible to second jay?
To find out, Amodio et al. watched Eurasian jays hiding macadamia nuts or peanuts in the presence of another jay. In the first setup, jays were given one food to hide and two possible hiding places, one opaque and one transparent, while being watched by a jay that had either had its fill of the food, or not tried it. In the second setup, jays were given both foods to hide, but only had one place to hide them (either transparent or opaque); while being watched by a jay that had eaten enough of one of the foods.
Contrary to expectations, the jays did not seem to be able to combine the information about what the other jay could see and what it had been eating. In fact, they seemed unable to respond to either piece of information. When Amodio et al. repeated the original experiments, the jays did not seem to prefer to hide food out of sight, or to hide food that the watcher had already eaten.
These results raise questions about the repeatability of experiments on food hiding strategies in birds of the crow family. It suggests that previous findings should be further investigated, potentially to identify important factors that might affect the repeatability of food-hiding tactics. Repeating the experiments may show how best to investigate behavioural patterns in jays in the future.
