Abstract
Whether prey retains antipredator behavior after a long period of predator relaxation is an important question in predator-prey evolution. Père David's deer have been raised in enclosures for more than 1200 years and this isolation provides an opportunity to study whether Père David's deer still respond to the cues of their ancestral predators or to novel predators. We played back the sounds of crows (familiar sound) and domestic dogs (familiar non-predators), of tigers and wolves (ancestral predators), and of lions (potential naïve predator) to Père David's deer in paddocks, and blank sounds to the control group, and videoed the behavior of the deer during the experiment. We also showed life-size photo models of dog, leopard, bear, tiger, wolf, and lion to the deer and video taped their responses after seeing these models. Père David's deer stared at and approached the hidden loudspeaker when they heard the roars of tiger or lion. The deer listened to tiger roars longer, approached to tiger roars more and spent more time staring at the tiger model. The stags were also found to forage less in the trials of tiger roars than that of other sound playbacks. Additionally, it took longer for the deer to restore their normal behavior after they heard tiger roars, which was longer than that after the trial of other sound playbacks. Moreover, the deer were only found to walk away after hearing the sounds of tiger and wolf. Therefore, the tiger was probably the main predator for Père David's deer in ancient time. Our study implies that Père David's deer still retain the memories of the acoustic and visual cues of their ancestral predators in spite of the long term isolation from natural habitat.
Highlights
Antipredator responses, the later vigilance behaviors such as scan, alert call and flee, evolve to allow animals to minimize their risk of predation [1,2,3,4,5]
Previous studies indicated that the loss of predators may lead to rapid loss of antipredator behavior [13]
We carried out our experiment of sound playback on a free ranging population
Summary
Antipredator responses, the later vigilance behaviors such as scan, alert call and flee, evolve to allow animals to minimize their risk of predation [1,2,3,4,5]. During a long history of coevolution, animals selectively retained ability to respond to the cues of their predators [8,9,10,11]. Others suggested that antipredator response may persist for many generations [14,15]. The divarication for this question may be explained by the Multipredator Hypothesis and the period of isolation from predator
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