Dissertation Research: Understanding the Defended Phenotype: The Importance of Predator Diet and Environmental Context on Inducible Defenses

论文研究：了解防御表型：捕食者饮食和环境背景对诱导防御的重要性

• 批准号: 0508282
• 负责人: Rick Relyea
• 金额: $ 1.15万
• 依托单位: University of Pittsburgh
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-07-15 至 2006-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0508282&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Dissertation; Research; Understanding; Defended; Phenotype

Surviving in the face of environmental variation provides a significant challenge for many organisms. All organisms must balance the conflicting demands of gaining resources, finding mates, and avoiding predators. To know how to balance these demands, organisms rely on a variety of cues (visual, tactile, chemical) that provide information about how to best allocation their time and energy. In aquatic systems, many organisms use chemical cues (that are emitted when a predator consumes its prey) to gain information about predation risk. These chemicals induce prey to change their behavior and morphology so that they are less susceptible to predators; however, these defenses come at the cost of slower growth and decreased reproduction. Therefore, by choosing to devote energy to anti-predator defenses, the prey reduce their ability to gather resources and compete with other species in the community. Consequently, to understand ecological communities we must understand how species respond to the information provided by predation cues. While numerous studies have determined that chemical cues affect prey behavior and morphology, we often do not know the reason why prey react the way they do and whether or not the responses observed in laboratory experiments are representative of what happens in nature. Therefore, our research is designed to determine how prey detect and interpret the chemical cues of predators under more natural conditions. The broader impacts of this project include training undergraduate assistants, disseminating our work in top-tier journals and at international conferences, and striving to report our work in the popular press.

面对环境变化，生存为许多生物体带来了重大挑战。 所有生物体必须平衡获得资源，寻找伴侣和避免掠食者的冲突要求。 为了知道如何平衡这些需求，生物体依靠各种提示（视觉，触觉，化学）提供有关如何最好地分配时间和精力的信息。 在水生系统中，许多生物使用化学提示（捕食者食用猎物时会发出）来获取有关捕食风险的信息。 这些化学物质会诱导牺牲品改变其行为和形态，以使它们不太容易受到捕食者的影响。但是，这些防御措施是以较慢的增长和繁殖减少为代价的。 因此，通过选择将能量投入反抗抗议者的防御能力，猎物降低了他们收集资源并与社区中其他物种竞争的能力。 因此，要了解生态社区，我们必须了解物种如何应对捕食提示提供的信息。 尽管大量研究确定化学提示会影响猎物行为和形态，但我们通常不知道猎物以其采取的方式反应以及在实验室实验中观察到的反应是否代表了自然界中发生的情况。 因此，我们的研究旨在确定猎物在更自然的条件下如何检测和解释捕食者的化学提示。 该项目的更广泛影响包括培训本科助理，在顶级期刊和国际会议上传播我们的工作，并努力在大众媒体上报告我们的工作。