Abstract
Escape and surveillance responses to predators are lateralized in several vertebrate species. However, little is known on the laterality of escapes and predator surveillance in arthropods. In this study, we investigated the lateralization of escape and surveillance responses in young instars and adults of Locusta migratoria during biomimetic interactions with a robot-predator inspired to the Guinea fowl, Numida meleagris. Results showed individual-level lateralization in the jumping escape of locusts exposed to the robot-predator attack. The laterality of this response was higher in L. migratoria adults over young instars. Furthermore, population-level lateralization of predator surveillance was found testing both L. migratoria adults and young instars; locusts used the right compound eye to oversee the robot-predator. Right-biased individuals were more stationary over left-biased ones during surveillance of the robot-predator. Individual-level lateralization could avoid predictability during the jumping escape. Population-level lateralization may improve coordination in the swarm during specific group tasks such as predator surveillance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of lateralized predator-prey interactions in insects. Our findings outline the possibility of using biomimetic robots to study predator-prey interaction, avoiding the use of real predators, thus achieving standardized experimental conditions to investigate complex and flexible behaviours.
Highlights
Predator-prey interactions are processes influencing the distribution, abundance and dynamics of animal populations in the ecosystems[1,2,3]
The jumping escape response to a Guinea fowl-mimicking robotic predator was lateralized at the individual level, while the same was not true at the population level (F2,89 = 0.312; P < 0.7330)
We investigated the lateralization of escape and surveillance responses in young instars and adults of L. migratoria during interactions with a biomimetic robot-predator inspired by the helmeted Guinea fowl
Summary
Predator-prey interactions are processes influencing the distribution, abundance and dynamics of animal populations in the ecosystems[1,2,3]. Biased locusts made fewer errors with their preferred forelimb, suggesting that stronger lateralization provides an advantage in terms of boosted motor control in an invertebrate with individual-level lateralization[37] These inferences suggested us to investigate the presence of lateral bias in Acrididae during predator-prey interactions. To simulate a predation event, we developed a robot predator inspired to the helmeted Guinea fowl, Numida meleagris (Linnaeus) (Galliformes: Numididae), a natural enemy of locusts, used as a biological control agent in several regions[38,39,40] This engineered approach, merging robotics with ethology, known as ethorobotics[41,42,43], allows us to produce readily controllable life-like stimuli that can allow more realistic interactions with animals[44,45] if compared to traditional static dummies and 2-dimensional video-playbacks[46,47,48,49]. One of the earlier use of robots to study insects dates to 198961, only few examples are available about insect behavioural research[62,63,64,65,66]
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