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- Creator:
- Moore, Talia Y., Danforth, Shannon M., Larson, Joanna G., and Davis Rabosky, Alison R.
- Description:
- Warning signals in chemically defended organisms are critical components of predator-prey interactions, often requiring multiple coordinated display components for a signal to be effective. When threatened by a predator, venomous coral snakes (genus Micrurus) display a vigorous, non-locomotory thrashing behaviour that has been only qualitatively described. Given the high-contrast and often colourful banding patterns of these snakes, this thrashing display is hypothesized to be a key component of a complex aposematic signal under strong stabilizing selection across species in a mimicry system. By experimentally testing snake response across simulated predator cues, we analysed variation in the presence and expression of a thrashing display across five species of South American coral snakes. Although the major features of the thrash display were conserved across species, we found significant variation in the propensity to perform a display at all, the duration of thrashing, and the curvature of snake bodies that was mediated by predator cue type, snake body size, and species identity. We also found an interaction between curve magnitude and body location that clearly shows which parts of the display vary most across individuals and species. Our results suggest that contrary to the assumption in the literature that all species and individuals perform the same display, a high degree of variation persists in thrashing behaviour exhibited by Micrurus coral snakes despite presumably strong selection to converge on a common signal. This quantitative behavioural characterization presents a new framework for analysing the non-locomotory motions displayed by snakes in a broader ecological context, especially for signalling systems with complex interaction across multiple modalities.
- Keyword:
- aposematism, biomechanics, coral snake mimicry, curvature, Elapidae, non-locomotory motion, Peruvian Amazon, and snake behaviour
- Citation to related publication:
- Moore, T. Y., Danforth, S. M., Larson, J. G., & Davis Rabosky, A. R. (2020). A Quantitative Analysis of Micrurus Coral Snakes Reveals Unexpected Variation in Stereotyped Anti-Predator Displays Within a Mimicry System. Integrative Organismal Biology, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaa006
- Discipline:
- Science
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- Creator:
- Davis Rabosky, Alison R., Moore, Talia Y., Sánchez-Paredes, Ciara M., Westeen, Erin P., Larson, Joanna G., Sealey, Briana A., and Balinski, Bailey A.
- Description:
- Animals in nature use diverse strategies to evade or deter their predators, including many vivid behavioural displays only qualitatively described from field encounters with natural predators or humans. Within venomous snake mimicry, stereotyped anti-predator displays are suggested to be a critical component of the warning signal given by toxic models and thus under strong selection for independent convergence in mimetic species. However, no studies have systematically quantified variation in snake anti-predator displays across taxonomically broad clades to test how these behaviours evolve across species within a phylogenetic comparative methods framework. Here we describe a new, high-throughput approach for collecting and scoring snake anti-predator displays in the field that demonstrates both low observer bias and infinite extension across any species. Then, we show our method's utility in quantitatively comparing the behaviour of 20 highly-divergent snake species from the Amazonian lowlands of Peru. We found that a simple experimental setup varying simulated predator cues was very successful in eliciting anti-predator displays across species and that high-speed videography captured a greater diversity of behavioural responses than described in the literature. We also found that although different display components evolve at different rates with complicated patterns of covariance, there is clear evidence of evolutionary convergence in anti-predator displays among distantly related elapid coral snakes and their colubrid mimics. We conclude that our approach significantly advances opportunity for future analyses of snake behaviour, kinematics, and the evolution of anti-predator signals more generally, especially macroevolutionary analyses across clades with similarly intractable behavioural diversity.
- Keyword:
- Batesian mimicry, phylogenetic comparative methods, signal evolution, aposematism, simulated predator cues, coral snakes, and Peruvian Amazon
- Citation to related publication:
- Alison R. Davis Rabosky, Talia Y. Moore, Ciara M. Sanchez-Paredes, Erin P. Westeen, Joanna G. Larson, Briana A. Sealey, Bailey A. Balinski (2020) Convergence and divergence in anti-predator displays: A novel approach to quantitative behavioural comparison in snakes. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blaa222
- Discipline:
- Science