The behavioural and evolutionary ecology of fear: risk assessment by fishes and amphibians

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The success of an animal depends on its ability to do three basic things: to forage, to avoid being eaten and to successfully reproduce. Consequently, the question of how animals avoid predation is a central issue in biology. To avoid predators prey need to constantly assess their risk of predation, hence this is the major focus of my research program. As a first step, our work will address how prey animals learn to distinguish predators from non-predators. This is a crucial pre-requisite for being able to respond to predators and is essential to allow the prey to avoid costly responses to animals that are not a threat. The second major focus of our work centers on understanding how variation in predation risk through time will influence behavioural decisions of prey. Temporal variation in risk has far reaching implications for decisions about when and where animals will forage and reproduce, which mates they select and how much effort they devote to territory defence. This is a rapidly emerging field that has the potential to completely revolutionize our thinking in many sub-disciplines of behavioural ecology. Recognition of predation risk by fishes is often mediated by chemical 'alarm cues' released from specialized club cells in the skin when the fish is captured by a predator. We recently showed that these cells likely evolved in an immune context to minimize effects from damage to the skin, and that the alarm function of the cells evolved secondarily because selection favours prey responding to information indicating that a nearby individual was recently captured. We will continue this exciting work specifically testing whether fishes increase their alarm cell investment as a protective measure when exposed to UVB radiation. The final focus of the proposal will be to examine the effects of metals on the chemosensory recognition of predators by fishes, thereby directly linking the behavioural ecology of risk assessment with metal contamination. Understanding the potential harmful effects of metals on aquatic ecosystems is particularly important as the mining industry continues to expand in Canada. A major emphasis in this proposal is on the training of HQP; I will train 5 PhD students through the course of this grant cycle.