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Lizards from suburban areas learn faster to stay safe.

ABSTRACT: Enhanced cognitive ability is beneficial in unpredictable and harsh environments, as it enables animals to respond with flexibility. For animals living in urbanized areas, local environments not only are altered but can rapidly change during their lifetime. Urban residents are therefore challenged with identifying novel dangers and safe refuges in dynamic environments. We demonstrate that the tropical agamid lizard Psammophilus dorsalis experiences dramatically different habitats not only across the rural to urban spatial scale but also over the short temporal scale of a few years in suburban areas. Differences in environmental stability are expected to affect rates of learning and reversal learning in resident lizards. In testing arenas, lizards from these populations were required to choose a designated 'safe' refuge instead of an 'unsafe' one after simulated predator attacks. The contingency for safety was switched during the reversal learning task. In general, P. dorsalis showed high rates of learning and reversal learning, but lizards from suburban areas were quicker to learn and unlearn the location of the safe refuge than those from rural areas. This demonstrates for the first time to our knowledge that suburban lizards have faster learning and reversal learning skills for a key survival-related behaviour, finding safety in unpredictable environments.

SUBMITTER: Batabyal A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6405467 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Lizards from suburban areas learn faster to stay safe.

Batabyal Anuradha A Thaker Maria M

Biology letters 20190201 2

Enhanced cognitive ability is beneficial in unpredictable and harsh environments, as it enables animals to respond with flexibility. For animals living in urbanized areas, local environments not only are altered but can rapidly change during their lifetime. Urban residents are therefore challenged with identifying novel dangers and safe refuges in dynamic environments. We demonstrate that the tropical agamid lizard Psammophilus dorsalis experiences dramatically different habitats not only across ...[more]

PMID: 30958137

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Urbanization is occurring rapidly on a global scale and is altering mosquito communities, creating assemblages that are characteristically less diverse. Despite high rates of urbanization and ample examples of vector-borne diseases transmitted by multiple species, the effects of urbanization-driven mosquito diversity losses on disease transmission has not been well explored. We investigated this question using the dog heartworm, a filarial parasite vectored by numerous mosquito species. METHODS:We trapped host-seeking mosquitoes in undeveloped areas and neighborhoods of different ages in Wake County, North Carolina, USA, analyzing captured mosquitoes for heartworm DNA. We compared within-mosquito heartworm infection across land-use types by Kruskal-Wallis and likelihood ratio tests. Using zip code level data acquired from dogs in a local shelter, we performed linear regressions of within-host heartworm prevalence by within-mosquito heartworm prevalence as well as by three mosquito diversity measures. We also determined the best predictor of host-level prevalence among models including within-mosquito infection, mosquito diversity and abundance, and socioeconomic status as variables. RESULTS:Suburban areas had lower within-mosquito heartworm prevalence and lower likelihood of heartworm-positive mosquitoes than did undeveloped field sites, although no differences were seen between suburban and undeveloped wooded sites. No relationships were noted between within-mosquito and within-host heartworm prevalence. However, mosquito diversity metrics were positively correlated with host heartworm prevalence. Model selection revealed within-host prevalence was best predicted by a positive relationship with mosquito Shannon-Wiener diversity and a negative relationship with household income. CONCLUSIONS:Our results demonstrate that decreases in mosquito diversity due to urbanization alter vector-borne disease risk. With regard to dog heartworm disease, this loss of mosquito diversity is associated with decreased heartworm prevalence within both the vector and the host. Although the response is likely different for diseases transmitted by one or few species, mosquito diversity losses leading to decreased transmission could be generalizable to other pathogens with multiple vectors. This study contributes to better understanding of the effects of urbanization and the role of vector diversity in multi-vectored pathosystems.

Dataset Information

Lizards from suburban areas learn faster to stay safe.

Publications

Lizards from suburban areas learn faster to stay safe.

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