FINE-TUNED PHENOTYPES: TADPOLE PLASTICITY UNDER 16 COMBINATIONS OF PREDATORS AND COMPETITORS

Abstract

It is now well appreciated that most organisms can alter their phenotypes when faced with environmental variation. Decades of empirical investigations have documented hundreds of examples of phenotypic plasticity, yet most studies have focused on the presence or absence of a single environmental factor. As a result, we know little about how organisms respond to gradients of environmental factors (i.e., threshold responses vs. continuous responses), nor do we understand how organisms respond to combinations of environmental variables. I examined how larval wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) altered their behavior, morphology, and growth in response to combined gradients of predation and competition. Increased predation risk induced lower activity, deeper tails, and shorter bodies, which collectively caused slower growth. Increased competition caused slower growth which induced higher activity, shallower tails, and longer bodies. For both environmental gradients, the responses were frequently continuous rather than threshold responses. Moreover, predation and competition had interactive effects. Responses to predators were always larger under low competition than under high competition. Responses to competition were larger under low predation risk when predation and competition induced traits in the same direction, but larger under high predation risk when predation and competition induced traits in opposite directions. The results demonstrate that responses to phenotypically plastic traits can be fine-tuned to a wide variety of environmental combinations.