Adopt, ignore, or kill? Male poison frogs adjust parental decisions according to their territorial status

Abstract

Systematic infanticide of unrelated young has been reported in several animal taxa. Particular attention has been given to carnivores and primates, where infanticide is a sexually selected strategy of males to gain increased access to female mating partners. Cannibals must ensure avoiding their own offspring and targeting only unrelated young. Therefore, decision rules are needed to mediate parental and cannibalistic behaviour. Here we show experimentally that male poison frogs adjust their parental responses – care or infanticide – towards unrelated clutches according to their territorial status. Male frogs followed the simple rule ‘care for any clutch’ inside their territory, but immediately switched to cannibalism when establishing a new territory. This demonstrates that simple cognitive rules can mediate complex behaviours such as parental care, and that care and cannibalism are antagonistically linked. Non-parental infanticide is mediated by territorial cues and presumably serves to prevent misdirected care in this poison frog. Our results thus prompt a re-consideration of evolutionary and causal aspects of parental decision making, by suggesting that selective infanticide of unrelated young may generally become adaptive when the risks and costs of misdirected care are high.

Gender-specific differences in cannibalism between a laboratory strain and a field strain of a predatory mite

“…Several studies have focused on kin recognition in phytoseiid mites (Faraji et al 2000 ; Schausberger and Croft 2001 ), but also in other animal taxa (Pfennig 1997 ; Bilde and Lubin 2001 ; Parsons et al 2013 ; Bayoumy and Michaud 2015 ; Ringler et al 2017 ). In the spider species Stegodyphus lineatus cannibalism was lower in groups where all the individuals were kin than in mixed groups of kin and non-kin (Bilde and Lubin 2001 ).…”

“…Cannibalism, the act of killing and consuming an individual of the same species, is a common phenomenon across the animal kingdom. It occurs in various taxa such as birds (Cain et al 1984 ), fish (Okuda and Yanagisawa 1996 ), frogs (Ringler et al 2017 ), salamanders (Takatsu and Kishida 2015 ), spiders (Bilde and Lubin 2001 ), insects (Tschinkel 1981 ) and mites (Yao and Chant 1989 ). Animals prey on conspecifics mainly as a response to low food densities (Fox 1975 ), but cannibalism is also affected by stress, kin competition or mate competition and prey vulnerability (Fox 1975 ; Polis 1981 ; Pfennig 1997 ).…”

Developments in Amphibian Parental Care Research: History, Present Advances, and Future Perspectives

“…It is increasingly evident that amphibians are an excellent system to address timely and relevant questions about the evolution of reproductive strategies, including parental care (i.e., Kupfer et al 2006;Brown et al 2010;Poo and Bickford 2013;Reinhard et al 2013;Stynoski et al 2014b;Vargas-Salinas et al 2014;Lehtinen et al 2014;Rojas 2014;Bravo-Valencia and Delia 2016;Yoshioka et al 2016;Delia et al 2017;Ringler et al 2017;Schulte and Mayer 2017;Stynoski et al 2018). The advent of new technologies has broadened the range of questions that can be addressed concerning the molecular and physiological underpinnings of parental behaviors (Roland and O'Connell 2015;Fischer et al 2019).…”

Spatio-Temporal Characteristics of the Prolonged Courtship in Brilliant-Thighed Poison Frogs, Allobates femoralis

“…Weinlein, personal observation). In captivity, males have been shown to transport all tadpoles in their territory regardless of the paternity (Ringler et al 2016a), but to cannibalize clutches when taking over a new territory (Ringler et al 2017). Females perform compensatory tadpole transport only in cases where the respective fathers are missing (Ringler et al 2015).…”