Dietary tuning of poison frog tadpole behavior and development

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Poison frogs are toxic due to alkaloids they are able to take up from the diet and bioaccumulate, and this toxicity correlates to their conspicuous coloration, known as aposematism. In a dendrobatid poison frog, Ranitomeya imitator, tadpoles are fed by their mothers, who periodically deposit alkaloid-containing unfertilized eggs for their consumption. Animal behaviors are coordinated by the central nervous system and influenced by early life diet. With the aim to investigate how feeding frequency and alkaloid consumption influence the development and behavior of poison frogs, I propose a project with different experiments: i) to conduct behavioral assays coupled to 3D immunohistochemistry (iDISCO) to identify differences in the neural circuitry for begging and aggressive behaviors in tadpoles under a control treatment, a fasting treatment (fed the same quantity but less frequently) and an alkaloid treatment (fed the same quantity and frequency but adding the alkaloid trans-Decahydroquinoline); ii) to evaluate how these treatments affect tadpoles’ metabolic rate and development, and if they have a carry-over effect on the juvenile metabolic rate and behavior; iii) to test if the intensity of these behaviors in juveniles is correlated to the expression of pertinent neuropeptides and receptors in the hypothalamus. This work will set a baseline to study the evolution of parental care in poison frogs and will pioneer in setting a neural and molecular basis to investigate the evolution of aposematism and aposematic behavior.