Can birds have culture, and why does it matter?

Please note that this is a hybrid event and will be recorded.

Abstract

When innovations arise in human societies, they can spread rapidly through social networks to form new cultural traits––a vital component of our success. A long history of research has now established that other animals can also exhibit culture. But can cultural traits in animals also emerge and change in response to social and environmental drivers? And can culture be an important determinant of behavioural flexibility in other species? Here, I summarize how my research addresses these questions in birds, using approaches ranging from automated tracking to citizen science, from controlled captive studies to large-scale wild experiments. These highlight how the learnt experience of other individuals can have profound implications for how animals learn about and exploit their environments.

About the speaker

Dr Lucy Aplin leads the Cognitive and Cultural Ecology (CCE) Group in the Research School of Biology at ANU and holds an SNSF Professorship at SNSF Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich. Lucy's research explores the interactions between cognition, sociality and ecology, mostly in birds. She is especially interested the emergent properties of these interaction-social networks, animal culture and cultural evolution. Her recent work has explored the spread of innovation across social and geographic networks, and how cultures change over time in response to social and environmental drivers.