Poison Frog Tadpoles Must Survive Cannibalistic 'Battle Royale' To Reach Adulthood - IFLScience

-

Beginning life in a big pool of cannibals is a tough gig, but that's the reality for tadpoles of the dyeing poison dart frog Dendrobates tinctorius. The unconventional creche sees tadpoles Battle Royale it out to make it to adulthood, but research has found several factors can influence an individual's odds of survival.

Fights to the death usually go better for bigger individuals, and the same is true for tadpoles trying to survive in the perilous ponds they're placed into by their fathers. The small bodies of water that house D. tinctorius juveniles in the tropics have scarce resources (hence all the cannibalism), but muscle isn't the only deciding factor in staying alive.

Intraspecies aggression like cannibalism frees up resources, but it can also reduce your genetic material's ability to spread (also known as inclusive fitness) if you're wiping out your close relatives in the process. As such, some animals have evolved to avoid kin when on a killing spree.

To see if this was the case for D. tinctorius, researchers on a new study published in Behavioral Ecology created a tadpole battle arena that would enable them to identify how size and genetic relatedness altered the tadpoles' aggression.

"Before you eat someone, you have to attack them first," said the authors, who were looking to observe aggression in the tadpoles rather than letting them devour one another.

By pitting full-sibling, half-sibling, and unrelated tadpoles against one another, they could observe the role that size and relatedness played. They found that the most aggressive tadpoles were the biggest individuals in non-sibling fights, and that siblings attacked each other comparatively less often.

"We find that aggression depends on both size and relatedness: when set in pairs, large tadpoles are half as aggressive towards their smaller siblings than to [non-siblings]," summarized the authors.

"It looks like belonging to the same family provides some protection against aggression, though no one is ever truly safe."

The victors who survive to full metamorphosis will eventually crawl out of the Pool of Death to inhabit the wetter corners of French Guiana and parts of Brazil. The dyeing poison dart frog has vibrant coloration as an adult, warning of the highly toxic poison that's found on its skin.

As its name suggests, this effective defense mechanism has been harnessed by humans to lace darts used for hunting. Quite fitting that a creature that begins life in a pool of violence should later become a literal weapon.

[H/T: Phys.org]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All In The Family: Maine Mother & Son Charged in Massive Drug Bust

-
Image
corso dog :: Article Creator Woman Hospitalized After Attack By 2 Dogs At Same Edmonton Home Where Boy Died: Lawyer UPDATE: On April 15, 2024, the City of Edmonton provided an update on the fatal attack. It said that prior to the deadly incident on April 1, "the city had no lawful basis to remove the dogs from the home." The city added that "all prior complaints about the dogs involved in this incident were investigated thoroughly and appropriate action was taken in accordance with the applicable legislation." The city also said a review found that its staff "acted appropriately in accordance with our standard practices and in compliance with the relevant legal constraints given the nature of past complaints and reports." A woman was hospitalized after being attacked in February by two large Cane Corso dogs at the same home where an 11-year-old boy was killed last week, the woman's lawyer told Global News. "I
Read more

Rare Frogs And Illegal Drugs - Palisades Hudson Financial Group

-
Image
Colombian conservationist Ivan Lozano has hit on a brilliantly promising strategy to protect his country’s rare and endangered amphibians. His plan: Flood the market with them. Lozano is not hunting rare frogs in Colombia’s Andean forests. He is raising them himself and selling them at prices designed to undercut poachers and smugglers. If he can raise the frogs cheaply enough, and in large enough numbers, he might manage to drive down the market price to the point that poachers no longer find it worthwhile to harvest and smuggle the creatures onto the black markets. Lozano told The Associated Press that his company also encourages collectors to breed their own frogs. Picture yourself as a poacher. If the government toughens the legal penalties and steps up enforcement, you will shrug your shoulders; legal risks are a basic cost of doing business. Since the demand for your product already exists among foreign collectors and other buyers, tougher enforcement merely reduces supply a
Read more

Burn scars, winter storms threaten rare and endangered species in San Gabriel Mountains - The Bakersfield Californian

-
Image
LOS ANGELES — Up until a few weeks ago, the West Fork of the San Gabriel River was one of the most abundant wildlife habitats in Los Angeles County, a secluded and rugged area defined by its steep peaks, lush canyons and mixture of rare and endangered species. Recently however, a team of federal biologists and forest rangers was aghast when it visited the stream following the Bobcat fire, which has burned more than 115,000 acres in the heart of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument. Terrain that once resembled a High Sierra granite gorge now looked like ground zero after a nuclear explosion, and the usually clean mountain air was sharp with the stench of smoke. Particularly unsettling were the bare and ashen slopes that were now primed to dissolve under pounding winter storms. A heavy mudslide, experts said, could reverse decades of conservation efforts by inundating the last outposts for such federally protected species as the Santa Ana sucker fish and Southern California m
Read more