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Developmental and maternal effects of
predation on cognition and behaviour in guppies
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Supervisors:
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Drs. David
Mitchell, Regina Vega Trejo, Alexander Kotrschal
Contact details : email : david.mitchell@zoologi.su.se
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Keywords:
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Animal cognition, developmental plasticity, animal
personality
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Summary:
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Animals
must deal with a constantly changing environment, though genetic adaptation
through natural selection will often occur too slowly. This is particularly true
of predation, where dispersal and colonisation of predators or prey may lead
to rapid changes in conditions. Plastic responses allow for more rapid change
in phenotypes, which can be induced across multiple temporal stages. For
instance, environmental conditions experienced by parents can alter the
phenotypes of their offspring, and developmental plasticity can be induced by
experiences during early ontogeny. Behavioural traits are particularly
labile, able to respond in real time to the current context. Here, we are
interested in how contrasting information at these different temporal stages
affect the expressed phenotype. We expose parents and offspring during early
ontogeny to olfactory alarm cues, which simulate predation risk. We then
measure brain anatomy, learning and behavioural traits to quantify how these
manipulations affect the expressed phenotype and how contrasting information
at different temporal stages is resolved. In your internship, you will take
fish from this manipulation and collect data on behaviour, learning ability,
brain morphology and/or metabolism, among other options. For particularly enthusiastic
students, there is the potential to tailor the experiment to your research
interests.
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Relevant
literature
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Reddon AR, Chouinard-Thuly L, Leris I, Reader SM,
2018. Wild and laboratory exposure to cues of predation risk increases
relative brain mass in male guppies. Funct Ecol 32:1847-1856. doi:
doi:10.1111/1365-2435.13128.
Stein LR, Bukhari SA, Bell AM, 2018. Personal and
transgenerational cues are nonadditive at the phenotypic and molecular level.
Nat Ecol Evol 2:1306-1311. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0605-4.
Kotrschal A, Buechel SD, Zala SM, Corral A, Penn
DJ, Kolm N, 2015. Brain size affects female but not male survival under
predation threat. Ecol Lett 18:646-652. doi: 10.1111/ele.12441.
Kotrschal A, Deacon AE, Magurran AE, Kolm N,
2017. Predation pressure shapes brain anatomy in the wild. Evol Ecol
31:619-633. doi: 10.1007/s10682-017-9901-8.
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Techniques
involved in the project:
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Behavioural observations, learning trials, brain
dissections
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Required
skills and abilities:
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English, Statistics, Conscientious
Most skills can be taught during the internship,
though experience in behaviour or dissections is of course valued.
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