DOI: 10.5061/dryad.hx3ffbgs5
title: Monk parakeets “test the waters” when forming new relationships

description: To mitigate potential risks and develop trust, strangers may “test the
 waters” by gradually escalating the type of social investment from low
 cost to high cost. We introduced four unfamiliar groups of feral monk
 parakeets together and observed the sequence of social behaviors that
 occurred as relationships developed. We then tested the effect of
 relationship status (stranger vs familiar) on the probability of dyads
 following predicted sequences. We also tested whether strangers who
 progressed their relationships maintained higher rates of no-contact
 proximity compared to dyads that did not. We found that stranger dyads,
 but not familiar dyads, were more likely to (1) approach each other
 without contact before making contact and (2) follow predicted sequences
 of affiliative behaviors. Strangers that progressed to contact also had
 higher rates of associations than did birds that never made contact. We
 provide raw data and an R markdown file with code to reproduce all
 analyses and figures. 
description: Social behaviors and predicted sequences We categorized the first observed instances of behaviors based on perceptions of relative risk and investment into 3 levels: Low (no-contact proximity), Moderate (shoulder contact, allopreening, beak touching), or High (allofeeding, copulating), and visualized these behaviors using a Sankey plot. Estimating the effect of relationship status on the sequence of behaviors To assess whether the predicted sequences occurred more often in stranger dyads than in familiar dyads, we used the R package brms (version2.220) to fit two generalized multi-membership models (GLMM) with a Bernoulli outcome (logit link) for whether or not dyads followed the expected sequences. To simulate how often predicted sequences would occur if stranger and familiar dyads had exhibited behaviors in random order, we shuffled (1,000 iterations) the timebin in which behaviors were observed among dyads. Testing for relationship progression among strangers Using the same permutation-based reference model described above, we also used nonparametric permutation tests to assess whether the sequences occurred more than expected if stranger dyads had exhibited behaviors in random order. Finally, we assessed whether each bird’s mean hourly proximity rate with stranger dyads observed in affiliative contact was greater than the mean hourly proximity rate with stranger dyads not observed in affiliative contact, using a permuted paired t-test (5,000 iterations).
description: # Monk parakeets “test the waters” when forming new relationships Dataset
 DOI: [10.5061/dryad.hx3ffbgs5](10.5061/dryad.hx3ffbgs5) ## Description of
 the data and file structure Observers recorded spatial associations and
 dyadic interactions using an all-occurrence sampling method with the
 Animal Observer application on iPads. ### Files and variables #### File:
 2021_preperturbation_dyad_list.csv **Description:** list of birds during
 the experiment and all possible combinations of directed/undirected dyads
 (indcludes meta data) columns ##### Variables * dyadID: directed dyad;
 actor and subject color ID * actor: actor bird color ID * subject:
 receiver bird color ID * undir.dyad: undirected dyad; actor and subject ID
 ordered alphabetically * new.dyad: T/F; whether dyad were
 stranger/familiar * opp.sex: T/F; whether dyad were different/same sex
 #### File: BIOL.atts.csv **Description:** bird color ID and sex #####
 Variables * color_ID: unique 3 color combination used to mark and identify
 birds during social observations where each letter in the ID cooresponds
 to a distinct color (P=purple, I=pink, G=green, C=black, O=orange,
 B=blue). For example, the unqiue color_ID "BOG" represents the
 colors Blue-Orange-Green which were colored on birds head, cheek, and
 chest, respectively. * sex: sex of bird #### File: TTW_BIOLET_v2.Rmd
 **Description:** R markdown file with code to reproduce all analyses and
 figures #### File: BIOL.TTW.csv **Description:** edgelist of social
 interactionsv (includes bird attributes) ##### Variables *
 dyad: undirected dyad; actor and subject color ID ordered alphabetically *
 sample: rounded date time by five-minute timebin of observation *
 behavior: interaction; NN (nearest neighbor); s2s (shoulder to shoulder
 contact); allop (allopreen); beak_touch); alloF (allofeed); cop
 (copulation) * n: count of interaction per timebin 
 
 ## Code/software We performed all data analyses in R version 4.3.2 with
 the following packages: tidyverse, brms, cowplot, ggdist, tidybayes,
 ggplot2, networkD3, webshot, broom.mixed, ggpubr, beanplot, and egg