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Do Père David's Deer Lose Memories of Their Ancestral Predators?

Whether prey retains antipredator behavior after a long period of predator relaxation is an important question in predator-prey evolution. Père David's deer have been raised in enclosures for more than 1200 years and this isolation provides an opportunity to study whether Père David's deer...

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Autores principales: Li, Chunwang, Yang, Xiaobo, Ding, Yuhua, Zhang, Linyuan, Fang, Hongxia, Tang, Songhua, Jiang, Zhigang
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160898/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21887286
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0023623
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author Li, Chunwang
Yang, Xiaobo
Ding, Yuhua
Zhang, Linyuan
Fang, Hongxia
Tang, Songhua
Jiang, Zhigang
author_facet Li, Chunwang
Yang, Xiaobo
Ding, Yuhua
Zhang, Linyuan
Fang, Hongxia
Tang, Songhua
Jiang, Zhigang
author_sort Li, Chunwang
collection PubMed
description Whether prey retains antipredator behavior after a long period of predator relaxation is an important question in predator-prey evolution. Père David's deer have been raised in enclosures for more than 1200 years and this isolation provides an opportunity to study whether Père David's deer still respond to the cues of their ancestral predators or to novel predators. We played back the sounds of crows (familiar sound) and domestic dogs (familiar non-predators), of tigers and wolves (ancestral predators), and of lions (potential naïve predator) to Père David's deer in paddocks, and blank sounds to the control group, and videoed the behavior of the deer during the experiment. We also showed life-size photo models of dog, leopard, bear, tiger, wolf, and lion to the deer and video taped their responses after seeing these models. Père David's deer stared at and approached the hidden loudspeaker when they heard the roars of tiger or lion. The deer listened to tiger roars longer, approached to tiger roars more and spent more time staring at the tiger model. The stags were also found to forage less in the trials of tiger roars than that of other sound playbacks. Additionally, it took longer for the deer to restore their normal behavior after they heard tiger roars, which was longer than that after the trial of other sound playbacks. Moreover, the deer were only found to walk away after hearing the sounds of tiger and wolf. Therefore, the tiger was probably the main predator for Père David's deer in ancient time. Our study implies that Père David's deer still retain the memories of the acoustic and visual cues of their ancestral predators in spite of the long term isolation from natural habitat.
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spelling pubmed-31608982011-09-01 Do Père David's Deer Lose Memories of Their Ancestral Predators? Li, Chunwang Yang, Xiaobo Ding, Yuhua Zhang, Linyuan Fang, Hongxia Tang, Songhua Jiang, Zhigang PLoS One Research Article Whether prey retains antipredator behavior after a long period of predator relaxation is an important question in predator-prey evolution. Père David's deer have been raised in enclosures for more than 1200 years and this isolation provides an opportunity to study whether Père David's deer still respond to the cues of their ancestral predators or to novel predators. We played back the sounds of crows (familiar sound) and domestic dogs (familiar non-predators), of tigers and wolves (ancestral predators), and of lions (potential naïve predator) to Père David's deer in paddocks, and blank sounds to the control group, and videoed the behavior of the deer during the experiment. We also showed life-size photo models of dog, leopard, bear, tiger, wolf, and lion to the deer and video taped their responses after seeing these models. Père David's deer stared at and approached the hidden loudspeaker when they heard the roars of tiger or lion. The deer listened to tiger roars longer, approached to tiger roars more and spent more time staring at the tiger model. The stags were also found to forage less in the trials of tiger roars than that of other sound playbacks. Additionally, it took longer for the deer to restore their normal behavior after they heard tiger roars, which was longer than that after the trial of other sound playbacks. Moreover, the deer were only found to walk away after hearing the sounds of tiger and wolf. Therefore, the tiger was probably the main predator for Père David's deer in ancient time. Our study implies that Père David's deer still retain the memories of the acoustic and visual cues of their ancestral predators in spite of the long term isolation from natural habitat. Public Library of Science 2011-08-24 /pmc/articles/PMC3160898/ /pubmed/21887286 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0023623 Text en Li et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Li, Chunwang
Yang, Xiaobo
Ding, Yuhua
Zhang, Linyuan
Fang, Hongxia
Tang, Songhua
Jiang, Zhigang
Do Père David's Deer Lose Memories of Their Ancestral Predators?
title Do Père David's Deer Lose Memories of Their Ancestral Predators?
title_full Do Père David's Deer Lose Memories of Their Ancestral Predators?
title_fullStr Do Père David's Deer Lose Memories of Their Ancestral Predators?
title_full_unstemmed Do Père David's Deer Lose Memories of Their Ancestral Predators?
title_short Do Père David's Deer Lose Memories of Their Ancestral Predators?
title_sort do père david's deer lose memories of their ancestral predators?
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160898/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21887286
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0023623
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