Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University of Vienna, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Mol Ecol. 2018 May;27(9):2289-2301. doi: 10.1111/mec.14583. Epub 2018 Apr 23.
Parental decisions in animals are often context-dependent and shaped by fitness trade-offs between parents and offspring. For example, the selection of breeding habitats can considerably impact the fitness of both offspring and parents, and therefore, parents should carefully weigh the costs and benefits of available options for their current and future reproductive success. Here, we show that resource-use preferences are shaped by a trade-off between parental effort and offspring safety in a tadpole-transporting frog. In a large-scale in situ experiment, we investigated decision strategies across an entire population of poison frogs that distribute their tadpoles across multiple water bodies. Pool use followed a dynamic and sequential selection process, and transportation became more efficient over time. Our results point to a complex suite of environmental variables that are considered during offspring deposition, which necessitates a highly dynamic and flexible decision-making process in tadpole-transporting frogs.
动物的亲代决策通常是依赖于情境的，并受到亲代和后代之间适应性权衡的影响。例如，繁殖栖息地的选择会对后代和亲代的适应性产生重大影响，因此，亲代应该仔细权衡当前和未来繁殖成功的可用选择的成本和收益。在这里，我们展示了在一种蝌蚪运输蛙中，亲代努力和后代安全之间的权衡会影响资源利用偏好。在一项大规模的现场实验中，我们研究了分布在多个水体中的毒蛙整个种群的决策策略。水池的使用遵循一个动态和顺序的选择过程，并且随着时间的推移运输效率会提高。我们的研究结果表明，在蝌蚪沉积过程中会考虑到一系列复杂的环境变量，这需要蝌蚪运输蛙具有高度动态和灵活的决策过程。
