Colpo Karine Delevati, Reyes Jiménez Laura M
Instituto de Limnología Dr. Raúl A. Ringuelet (ILPLA), CONICET, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Boulevard 120 and 60, La Plata 1900, Argentina.
Instituto de Limnología Dr. Raúl A. Ringuelet (ILPLA), CONICET, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Boulevard 120 and 60, La Plata 1900, Argentina.
Zoology (Jena). 2023 Aug;159:126104. doi: 10.1016/j.zool.2023.126104. Epub 2023 Jul 24.
Animal reproductive success implies the performance of several behaviours, such as courting, mate searching, copulation, offspring production and care. These behaviours usually have high energetic and ecological costs. Therefore, to maximise their reproductive success, animals should make choices throughout their lives, such as deciding how much energy to invest in different activities, according to their conditions and needs. In temperate estuaries, the fiddler crab L. uruguayensis has a short reproductive period, with two synchronous spawning events. Considering that reproductive behaviours incur high energetic cost to fiddler crabs, we estimated how this species manages its activity budget throughout the reproductive period, to quantify trade-offs between the time spent on reproductive behaviours versus time spent on other activities. By analysing videos of females and males recorded in the field at different moments of the reproductive period, we observed that pre-copulatory behaviours, such as female wandering and male waving were more intense at the beginning of the reproductive period, suggesting that most matings occurred before the first spawning event but not before the second one. The ecological conditions during the breeding season and the individual strategies adopted by males and females mostly determine when and how much time to spend on courtship behaviours, and behavioural plasticity can be expected whenever the conditions change. The strategy used by L. uruguayensis for energy management, females' ability to store male gametes and environmental temperatures might have been the main factors determining the relative time spent in courtship behaviours during the reproductive period.
动物的繁殖成功意味着要表现出多种行为，比如求偶、寻找配偶、交配、生育后代和照顾幼崽。这些行为通常会消耗大量能量且具有生态成本。因此，为了使繁殖成功率最大化，动物应该在其一生中做出选择，例如根据自身状况和需求，决定在不同活动中投入多少能量。在温带河口地区，乌拉圭招潮蟹的繁殖期较短，有两次同步产卵事件。鉴于繁殖行为会给乌拉圭招潮蟹带来高昂的能量成本，我们估算了该物种在整个繁殖期是如何管理其活动预算的，以量化在繁殖行为上花费的时间与在其他活动上花费的时间之间的权衡。通过分析在繁殖期不同时刻在野外记录的雌性和雄性招潮蟹的视频，我们观察到，在繁殖期开始时，诸如雌性徘徊和雄性挥舞大螯等交配前行为更为频繁，这表明大多数交配发生在第一次产卵事件之前，但不是在第二次产卵事件之前。繁殖季节的生态条件以及雄性和雌性采取的个体策略主要决定了在求偶行为上花费的时间和时机，并且每当条件发生变化时，行为可塑性都是可以预期的。乌拉圭招潮蟹用于能量管理的策略、雌性储存雄配子的能力以及环境温度可能是决定繁殖期内在求偶行为上花费相对时间的主要因素。
