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Courting danger: socially dominant fish adjust their escape behavior and compensate for increased conspicuousness to avian predators

  • ADVANCES IN CICHLID RESEARCH IV
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Abstract

Males of many species display conspicuous colors to attract mates and deter rivals, although this benefit can incur an increased predation risk. In the African cichlid fish, Astatotilapia burtoni, males can change both their social status (dominant, DOM, or subordinate, SUB) and primary body color (yellow or blue). We hypothesized that these phenotypes vary in conspicuousness to predators and conspecifics, thus establishing a trade-off between intraspecific signaling and predation. We quantified the spectral reflectance of yellow and blue DOM and SUB males. We then constructed avian and conspecific visual receiver models to determine the relative conspicuousness of each phenotype. We show that there are significant differences in conspicuousness to predators and conspecifics, with the flanks of the yellow DOM males exhibiting more spectral contrast to both avian predators and conspecifics than the flanks of blue DOM males. Our measurements of escape behavior revealed that each morph exhibits distinct anti-predatory responses, with SUB males shoaling for protection, and the more conspicuous yellow DOM males executing more escape responses, potentially compensating for their increased conspicuousness. Our results suggest a novel mechanism for the maintenance of alternative male phenotypes in this species, where dynamically enhanced conspicuousness is offset by plastic changes in behavior.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Donald Faber for the loan of a high-speed camera and Harold Zakon for generous access to his laboratory. We also thank Kat Ruddick and Kendra Zwonitzer for technical assistance and Laura Crothers, Leslie Whitaker, and Rebecca Young-Brim for critically reading earlier versions of this manuscript. Thanks to all of the members of the Hofmann and Preuss laboratories for discussions. This work was supported by the Department of Defense SMART program (K. W. Whitaker); National Science Foundation (NSF)-IOS Grants IOS 0946637, IOS 11471172, and the Professional Staff Congress (PSC)-CUNY Research Award Program (T. Preuss); and NSF-IOS Grant 0751311, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology at The University of Texas at Austin (H. A. Hofmann).

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Whitaker, K.W., Alvarez, M., Preuss, T. et al. Courting danger: socially dominant fish adjust their escape behavior and compensate for increased conspicuousness to avian predators. Hydrobiologia 848, 3667–3681 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04475-9

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