Help! Help! Predator!
Guys, why aren’t you helping me?
You aren’t one of us.
Jackdaws respond to anti-predator calls to join the caller in mobbing the predator and driving it away. Yet researchers have now found that who the caller is will affect the level of response.
In playback experiments Woods et al (2018) that the highest response was to nestbox residents who would be highly familiar with the caller. The level of response to an anti-predator call diminished as familiarity decreased from colony members to non-colony members and then to rooks (a species that often lives alongside jackdaws).
Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-25793-y