Anuran tadpoles learn to recognize injury cues from members of the same prey guild

MARIANA PUETA; M G PEROTTI

ANIMAL COGNITION

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG

Lugar: HEIDELBERG; Año: 2016 vol. 19 p. 745 - 751

1435-9448

Recognition of predation risk from cues released from injured heterospecific could be beneficial when prey belongs to the same prey guild. Here, we performed three experiments. Experiment 1 showed that P.thaul tadpoles reduced their activity levels when exposedto conspecific injury cues, but not when exposed to amphipod injury cues. Experiment 2 tested whether P.thaul tadpoles can learn to recognize predation risk fromchemical cues released from injured heterospecifics fromthe same prey guild (amphipod, Hyalella patagonica). Agroup of tadpoles were conditioned by exposing them to aspecific concentration of amphipod injury cues paired with conspecific injury cues. Two days later, we evaluated changes in the activity of tadpoles when they were exposed to amphipod cues. As a control of learning, we used an unpaired group. Additionally, we used more control groups to fully investigate the learning mechanism. Our results showed that tadpoles can learn to recognize predation risk from injured amphipods and that the mechanism underlying the observed learned response could be associative.Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 and also showed that a low concentration of amphipod cues did not sustain that learning.