Learning steers the ontogeny of an efficient hunting sequence in zebrafish larvae.

Konstantinos Lagogiannis,Giovanni Diana,Martin P Meyer

doi:10.7554/elife.55119

Abstract

Goal-directed behaviors may be poorly coordinated in young animals but, with age and experience, behavior progressively adapts to efficiently exploit the animal's ecological niche. How experience impinges on the developing neural circuits of behavior is an open question. We have conducted a detailed study of the effects of experience on the ontogeny of hunting behavior in larval zebrafish. We report that larvae with prior experience of live prey consume considerably more prey than naive larvae. This is mainly due to increased capture success and a modest increase in hunt rate. We demonstrate that the initial turn to prey and the final capture manoeuvre of the hunting sequence were jointly modified by experience and that modification of these components predicted capture success. Our findings establish an ethologically relevant paradigm in zebrafish for studying how the brain is shaped by experience to drive the ontogeny of efficient behavior.

Highlights

The study of animal ethology has demonstrated an instrumental role of early experience in permanently embedding specific information about the environment in the developing animal, and in extending and enhancing behavioural repertoires [4, 47].An example of a dynamic behaviour that is found to benefit from learning by experience is predation as, across diverse species, it involves predicting and responding to the behaviour of another animal
The dry growth food (DF) and NF groups served as controls for behavioural effects that can be attributed to nutritional state
But statistically significant, effect on growth was determined by measuring mean body lengths at 7dpf (NF=4.18mm,DF=4.26mm,LF=4.34mm see Figure S13 ) [42]

Summary

Introduction

The study of animal ethology has demonstrated an instrumental role of early experience in permanently embedding specific information about the environment in the developing animal, and in extending and enhancing behavioural repertoires [4, 47]. An example of a dynamic behaviour that is found to benefit from learning by experience is predation as, across diverse species, it involves predicting and responding to the behaviour of another animal. In altricial species, which require an extended period of parental care, young animals learn to hunt from direct experience, and from mimicking the behaviour of parents or other conspecifics [14]. In which hunting behaviour is developed prenatally, hunting can be modified by experience.

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