Guangxi Key Laboratory of Forest Ecology and Conservation, College of Forestry, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi, People's Republic of China.
Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China.
Sci Rep. 2022 Feb 11;12(1):2334. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-05600-5.
Aposematic organisms defend themselves through various means to increase their unprofitability to predators which they advertise with conspicuous warning signals. Predators learn to avoid aposematic prey through associative learning that leads to lower predation. However, when these visual signals become unreliable (e.g., through automimicry or Batesian mimicry), predators may switch from using visual signals to taste sampling prey to choose among them. In this experiment, we tested this possibility in a field experiment where we released a total of 4800 mealworm prey in two clusters consisting of either: (i) undefended prey (injected with water) and (ii) model-mimics (injected with either quinine sulphate [models] or water [mimics]). Prey were deployed at 12 sites, with the mimic frequency of the model-mimics ranging between 0 and 1 (at 0.2 intervals). We found that taste rejection peaked at moderate mimic frequencies (0.4 and 0.6), supporting the idea that taste sampling and rejection of prey is related to signal reliability and predator uncertainty. This is the first time that taste-rejection has been shown to be related to the reliability of prey signals in a mimetic prey system.
警戒生物通过各种方式来保护自己，使其对捕食者来说无利可图，它们会用明显的警告信号来宣传自己。捕食者通过联想学习来避免警戒性猎物，从而降低捕食率。然而，当这些视觉信号变得不可靠时（例如，通过自动拟态或贝氏拟态），捕食者可能会从使用视觉信号转变为品尝猎物来选择猎物。在这个实验中，我们在一个野外实验中测试了这种可能性，我们总共在两个集群中释放了 4800 只黄粉虫猎物，集群 1 由未受防御的猎物（注射水）组成，集群 2 由模型模拟物（注射硫酸奎宁[模型]或水[模拟物]）组成。猎物被部署在 12 个地点，模型模拟物的模拟频率在 0 到 1 之间（以 0.2 的间隔变化）。我们发现，味觉排斥在中等模拟频率（0.4 和 0.6）时达到峰值，这支持了这样一种观点，即对猎物的味觉采样和排斥与信号可靠性和捕食者的不确定性有关。这是第一次在模仿猎物系统中证明味觉排斥与猎物信号的可靠性有关。
