Abstract
(1) Predation selects for antipredator competence in prey. For fishes with parental care, brood predators exert selection on the morphological phenotype of offspring, and also exert strong selection pressure to promote parental care behavior of adults. (2) This review summarizes field and lab studies on the ontogeny of antipredator competence in convict cichlids, a freshwater fish with extended biparental care of their free-swimming young. (3) Here, data show that differences in swimming performance between small and large young are exploited by parents when they adopt (smaller) young. Velocity and acceleration of startle responses improves nonlinearly with body size, increasing rapidly at a point when the skeleton rapidly ossifies from cartilage to bone, at the size at which discrimination by adopting parents shifts, and the timing of change in the rate of change in area protected by parents. Convict cichlids in a Nicaraguan lake population showed a similar correlation among these traits, but these traits are delayed relative to Costa Rican fish. (4) Population divergence is likely explained by relatively more intense brood predation in the lake, which selects for different optima of larval antipredator competence and parental brood defense.
Highlights
Predation is a major arbiter of natural selection that exerts its effects on prey evolution by pruning variation in behavioral, ontological and morphological phenotypes of prey [1,2,3]
I summarize a series of previously published papers on the evolutionary ecology of a freshwater fish species, the convict cichlid Amatitlania siquia, that reveal trait divergences in larval swimming performance and parental care between populations exposed to different levels of brood predation
Larval and juvenile convict cichlids in Laguna de Xiloá remain with their parents until they have grown much larger than typical size-at-dispersal observed broods in Río Cabuyo
Summary
Predation is a major arbiter of natural selection that exerts its effects on prey evolution by pruning variation in behavioral, ontological and morphological phenotypes of prey [1,2,3]. Unlike forms of parental care practiced by birds and mammals, parental fish generally do not provision their young with food. Parental care in fishes is primarily in the form of defense of developing embryos and newly hatched young against the threat of predators. Because adult fish are several orders of magnitude larger than their young (unlike birds and mammals), predators of fish larvae and young juveniles pose no threat to parents. Fish are ideal organisms for studying the effects of predation on the evolution of parental care. Parental care itself is linked to the ontogeny of antipredator competence of the young. There is a direct link between the vulnerability of young to predation, the duration and intensity of care, and the allocation of resources to reproduction. Fish vary widely in all of these traits and parental care behavior lies at the nexus of these life-history trade-offs
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