Daphnia lumholtzi – on the left, reared in the presence of fish, on the right, in the absence of fish

A study about to be published in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology shows that these kind of effects can also involve prey learning, even before they have hatched out of the egg. Maud Ferrari and Douglas Chivers investigated the behaviour of woodfrog (Rana sylvatica) tadpoles in response to a predator, the Tiger salamander. These tadpoles show no innate prey recognition, but if they are exposed to the smell of salamander before they hatch from they egg, they avoid predators when they have turned into tadpoles, by reducing their movement. [It may seem counter-intuitive to talk of "smell" in water, but many aquatic animals (including fish) have clearly distinct smell and taste pathways. I'll blog about this in the future.]

Ferrari and Chivers have taken this a step further, by seeing whether the tadpole embryos can actually learn the threat posed by a predator. To test this, they presented frogspawn with salamander odour coupled with cues from injured tadpoles, for two hours a day over five days, then tested the tadpoles for their responses to the predator.

They found that the amount of freezing shown by tadpoles was dependent on the concentration of the injured tadpole cues coupled with salamander smell, demonstrating that the embryos had learned to associate the two signals. There also seemed to be a time of day effect – the effect was stronger when learning took place in the afternoon, compared to the morning or early evening – although further experiments need to be done to confirm this.

In some species (especially insects), early experience can lead to the non-genetic transmission of preferences from one generation to another. This study shows that interactions between predator and prey can be extremely complex, involving innate responses, and learned changes in behaviour, which may even occur before birth.

Original article (open access).

BBC page, with quotes from Ferrari.

Moray eels possess a second pair of evertible jaws which come out and bring prey back into the throat, once it’s been seized by the nasty teeth you can normally see. Excellent set of videos and articles at the Nature website (you or your institution will need a subscription to see the full articles). The News & Views article describes the research as “a classic example of discovery-based science, stemming from an inspirational ‘oh wow!’ moment”.

News and Views piece; original article; videos.

This YouTube video was sent in by Robbie Price (2nd Year). It’s from the Kruger National Park (where the First Year Animal Behaviour Field Course goes) and starts off as your traditional scene of lions hunting wildebeest. But then something unusual happens…

It now appears that chimps not only use rocks and sticks, they also use ”spears”, according to this latest article in Current Biology (open access). Females pick up tool use quicker than males, which may have implications for the evolution of tool use in our species. BBC summary here.

A brief study in Science shows that elk have fewer offspring in years when wolves are plentiful, suggesting an indirect cost to predator avoidance. You or your institution will need a subscription to get past the abstract.