Abstract
Predator avoidance is an important behavior that affects the degree of adaptation of organisms. We compared the DNA variation of one of the predator-avoidance behaviors, the recently extensively studied "death-feigning behavior”, between the long strain bred for feigning death for a long time and the short strain bred for feigning death for a short time. To clarify how the difference in DNA sequences between the long and short strains corresponds to the physiological characteristics of the death-feigning duration at the transcriptome level, we performed comprehensive and comparative analyses of gene variants in Tribolium castaneum strains using DNA-resequencing. The duration of death feigning involves many gene pathways, including caffeine metabolism, tyrosine metabolism, tryptophan metabolism, metabolism of xenobiotics by cytochrome P450, longevity regulating pathways, and circadian rhythm. Artificial selection based on the duration of death feigning results in the preservation of variants of genes in these pathways in the long strain. This study suggests that many metabolic pathways and related genes may be involved in the decision-making process of anti-predator animal behavior by forming a network in addition to the tyrosine metabolic system, including dopamine, revealed in previous studies.
Highlights
Predator avoidance is an important behavior that affects the degree of adaptation of organisms
Small nucleotide variants (SNV), multi-nucleotide variants (MNV), deletion, insertion, and replacement were detected in a whole genome in long and short strains
Artificial selection based on the duration of death feigning results in the preservation of variants in genes in these particular metabolic and signaling pathways in the long strain, whereas the short strain with fewer variants of the DNA sequence might be selected more strongly than the long strain
Summary
Predator avoidance is an important behavior that affects the degree of adaptation of organisms. Death feigning (or thanatosis, tonic immobility, playing possum, playing dead, post-contact immobility, and so on) that have recently received special attention is one way to avoid enemy attack[3,4,5,6]. It has been considered an adaptive behavior for females to avoid sexual cannibalism[7,8], to avoid male harassment[9] and for individuals to avoid worker aggressions in social insects[10]. Uchiyama et al.[11] compared transcriptomes of beetle strains selected for short and long durations of death feigning. The duration of death feigning has been found to be multilaterally expressed with other traits of insects: for example, locomotor activity in T. castaneum[12], T. confusum[16], and T. freemani[17], flight ability in Callosobruchus chinensis[18], life history traits in C. chinensis[19], and mating behavior
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