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Evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations

Some defended prey animals can switch on their normally hidden aposematic signals. This switching may occur in reaction to predators’ approach (pre-attack signals) or attack (post-attack signals). Switchable aposematism has been relatively poorly studied, but we can expect that it might bring a vari...

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Autores principales: Song, Woncheol, Lee, Sang-im, Jablonski, Piotr G.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7153555/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32309047
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8915
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author Song, Woncheol
Lee, Sang-im
Jablonski, Piotr G.
author_facet Song, Woncheol
Lee, Sang-im
Jablonski, Piotr G.
author_sort Song, Woncheol
collection PubMed
description Some defended prey animals can switch on their normally hidden aposematic signals. This switching may occur in reaction to predators’ approach (pre-attack signals) or attack (post-attack signals). Switchable aposematism has been relatively poorly studied, but we can expect that it might bring a variety of benefits to an aposmetic organism. First, the switching could startle the predators (deimatism). Second, it could facilitate aversive learning. Third, it could minimize exposure or energetic expense, as the signal can be switched off. These potential benefits might offset costs of developing, maintaining and utilizing the switchable traits. Here we focused on the third benefit of switchability, the cost-saving aspect, and developed an individual-based computer simulation of predators and prey. In 88,128 model runs, we observed evolution of permanent, pre-attack, or post-attack aposematic signals of varying strength. We found that, in general, the pre-attack switchable aposematism may require moderate predator learning speed, high basal detectability, and moderate to high signal cost. On the other hand, the post-attack signals may arise under slow predator learning, low basal detectability and high signal cost. When predator population turnover is fast, it may lead to evolution of post-attack aposematic signals that are not conforming to the above tendency. We also suggest that a high switching cost may exert different selection pressure on the pre-attack than the post-attack switchable strategies. To our knowledge, these are the first theoretical attempts to systematically explore the evolution of switchable aposematism relative to permanent aposematism in defended prey. Our simulation model is capable of addressing additional questions beyond the scope of this article, and we open the simulation software, program manual and source code for free public use.
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spelling pubmed-71535552020-04-19 Evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations Song, Woncheol Lee, Sang-im Jablonski, Piotr G. PeerJ Animal Behavior Some defended prey animals can switch on their normally hidden aposematic signals. This switching may occur in reaction to predators’ approach (pre-attack signals) or attack (post-attack signals). Switchable aposematism has been relatively poorly studied, but we can expect that it might bring a variety of benefits to an aposmetic organism. First, the switching could startle the predators (deimatism). Second, it could facilitate aversive learning. Third, it could minimize exposure or energetic expense, as the signal can be switched off. These potential benefits might offset costs of developing, maintaining and utilizing the switchable traits. Here we focused on the third benefit of switchability, the cost-saving aspect, and developed an individual-based computer simulation of predators and prey. In 88,128 model runs, we observed evolution of permanent, pre-attack, or post-attack aposematic signals of varying strength. We found that, in general, the pre-attack switchable aposematism may require moderate predator learning speed, high basal detectability, and moderate to high signal cost. On the other hand, the post-attack signals may arise under slow predator learning, low basal detectability and high signal cost. When predator population turnover is fast, it may lead to evolution of post-attack aposematic signals that are not conforming to the above tendency. We also suggest that a high switching cost may exert different selection pressure on the pre-attack than the post-attack switchable strategies. To our knowledge, these are the first theoretical attempts to systematically explore the evolution of switchable aposematism relative to permanent aposematism in defended prey. Our simulation model is capable of addressing additional questions beyond the scope of this article, and we open the simulation software, program manual and source code for free public use. PeerJ Inc. 2020-04-10 /pmc/articles/PMC7153555/ /pubmed/32309047 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8915 Text en © 2020 Song et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Animal Behavior
Song, Woncheol
Lee, Sang-im
Jablonski, Piotr G.
Evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations
title Evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations
title_full Evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations
title_fullStr Evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations
title_full_unstemmed Evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations
title_short Evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations
title_sort evolution of switchable aposematism: insights from individual-based simulations
topic Animal Behavior
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7153555/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32309047
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8915
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