Keeping a watch on neighbors: social vigilance in Painted Stork ( Mycteria leucocephala ) nesting colonies

Social vigilance, the act of monitoring conspecifics, is a critical behavior in group-living species, balancing the demands of threat detection, resource acquisition, and social interactions. We measured social vigilance in Painted Storks (<em>Mycteria leucocephala</em>) nesting in colonies at Keoladeo National Park, India, using high-resolution video observations. We measured three different parameters of social vigilance: number of vigilance bouts, duration of vigilance, and proportion of time spent in vigilance. We aimed to investigate the relationship between social vigilance and various habitat variables related to coloniality such as colony size and number of neighbors. Other objectives included examining the effect of activity intensity on the levels of social vigilance and comparing vigilance levels between the sexes. Our results revealed that the number of neighboring conspecifics significantly influenced social vigilance, which increased with an increasing number of neighbors. Different neighbor activities led to variation in the duration of vigilance in focal individuals. However, we found no significant differences in vigilance parameters between females and males. Our findings highlight the importance of immediate social interactions within colonies for the need to defend nesting resources, assess threats, or gather social information from neighbors.