Dataset Information

Take the long way home: Behaviour of a neotropical frog, Allobates femoralis, in a detour task.

ABSTRACT: Detour behaviour, an individual's ability to reach its goal by taking an indirect route, has been used to test spatial cognitive abilities across a variety of taxa. Although many amphibians show a strong homing ability, there is currently little evidence of amphibian spatial cognitive flexibility. We tested whether a territorial frog, Allobates femoralis, can flexibly adjust its homing path when faced with an obstacle. We displaced male frogs from their calling sites into the centre of circular arenas and recorded their escape routes. In the first experiment we provided an arena with equally high walls. In the second experiment we doubled the height of the homeward facing wall. Finally, we provided a tube as a shortcut through the high wall. In the equal-height arena, most frogs chose to escape via the quadrant facing their former calling site. However, when challenged with different heights, nearly all frogs chose the low wall, directing their movements away from the calling site. In the "escape tunnel" experiment most frogs still chose the low wall. Our results show that displaced A. femoralis males can flexibly adjust their homing path and avoid (presumably energetically costly) obstacles, providing experimental evidence of spatial cognitive flexibility in an amphibian.

SUBMITTER: Munteanu AM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5458138 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Take the long way home: Behaviour of a neotropical frog, Allobates femoralis, in a detour task.

Munteanu Alexandru Marian AM Starnberger Iris I Pašukonis Andrius A Bugnyar Thomas T Hödl Walter W Fitch William Tecumseh WT

Behavioural processes 20160317

Detour behaviour, an individual's ability to reach its goal by taking an indirect route, has been used to test spatial cognitive abilities across a variety of taxa. Although many amphibians show a strong homing ability, there is currently little evidence of amphibian spatial cognitive flexibility. We tested whether a territorial frog, Allobates femoralis, can flexibly adjust its homing path when faced with an obstacle. We displaced male frogs from their calling sites into the centre of circular ...[more]

PMID: 26997105

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Project description:Longer-range movements of anuran amphibians such as mass migrations and habitat invasion have received a lot of attention, but fine-scale spatial behavior remains largely understudied. This gap is especially striking for species that show long-term site fidelity and display their whole behavioral repertoire in a small area. Studying fine-scale movement with conventional capture-mark-recapture techniques is difficult in inconspicuous amphibians: individuals are hard to find, repeated captures might affect their behavior and the number of data points is too low to allow a detailed interpretation of individual space use and time budgeting. In this study, we overcame these limitations by equipping females of the Brilliant-Thighed Poison Frog (Allobates femoralis) with a tag allowing frequent monitoring of their location and behavior. Neotropical poison frogs are well known for their complex behavior and diverse reproductive and parental care strategies. Although the ecology and behavior of the polygamous leaf-litter frog Allobates femoralis is well studied, little is known about the fine-scale space use of the non-territorial females who do not engage in acoustic and visual displays. We tracked 17 females for 6 to 17 days using a harmonic direction finder to provide the first precise analysis of female space use in this species. Females moved on average 1 m per hour and the fastest movement, over 20 m per hour, was related to a subsequent mating event. Traveled distances and activity patterns on days of courtship and mating differed considerably from days without reproduction. Frogs moved more on days with lower temperature and more precipitation, but mating seemed to be the main trigger for female movement. We observed 21 courtships of 12 tagged females. For seven females, we observed two consecutive mating events. Estimated home ranges after 14 days varied considerably between individuals and courtship and mating associated space use made up for ∼30% of the home range. Allobates femoralis females spent large parts of their time in one to three small centers of use. Females did not adjust their time or space use to the density of males in their surroundings and did not show wide-ranging exploratory behavior. Our study demonstrates how tracking combined with detailed behavioral observations can reveal the patterns and drivers of fine-scale spatial behavior in sedentary species.

Project description:Motor self-regulation is the ability to inhibit a prepotent response to a salient cue in favour of a more appropriate response. Motor self-regulation is an important component of the processes that interact to generate effective inhibitory control of behaviour, and is theorized to be a prerequisite of complex cognitive abilities in humans and other animals. In a large comparative study using the cylinder task, motor self-regulation was studied in 36 different species, mostly birds and primates. To broaden the range of species to comprehensively evaluate this phenomenon, motor self-regulation was studied in the domestic goat, which is a social ungulate species and moderate food specialist. Using the cylinder task, goats were first trained to perform a detour-reaching response to retrieve a reward from an opaque cylinder. Subsequently, an otherwise identical transparent cylinder was substituted for the opaque cylinder over 10 test trials. The goats' ability to resist approaching the visible reward directly by touching the cylinder and to retain the trained detour-reaching response was measured. The results indicated that goats showed motor self-regulation at a level comparable to or better than that of many of the bird and mammal species tested to date. However, the individual reaction patterns revealed large intra- and inter-individual variability regarding motor self-regulation. An improvement across trials was observed only in latency to make contact with the reward; no improvement in the proportion of accurate trials was observed. A short, distinct pointing gesture by the experimenter during baiting did not have any impact on the side of the cylinder to which the goats detoured. In half of goats, individual side biases were observed when detouring to the side of the cylinder, but there was no bias at the population level for either the left or right side. The results underline the need for a detailed examination of individual performance and additional measures to achieve a complete understanding of animal performance in motor self-regulation tasks.

Dataset Information

Take the long way home: Behaviour of a neotropical frog, Allobates femoralis, in a detour task.

Publications

Take the long way home: Behaviour of a neotropical frog, Allobates femoralis, in a detour task.

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