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

动物的成功取决于它做三件基本事情的能力：觅食，避免被吃掉和成功繁殖。因此，动物如何避免被捕食的问题是生物学的一个中心问题。为了避免捕食者的猎物需要不断评估他们的捕食风险，因此这是我的研究计划的主要重点。作为第一步，我们的工作将解决猎物动物如何学会区分捕食者和非捕食者。这是能够对捕食者做出反应的关键先决条件，也是让猎物避免对不构成威胁的动物做出昂贵反应的必要条件。我们工作的第二个主要重点是了解捕食风险随时间的变化如何影响猎物的行为决策。风险的时间变化对动物何时何地觅食和繁殖、选择哪种配偶以及为保卫领土付出多少努力等决策具有深远的影响。这是一个迅速兴起的领域，有可能彻底改变我们在行为生态学许多子学科中的思想。识别捕食风险的鱼类往往介导的化学“报警线索”释放专门的俱乐部细胞在皮肤上时，鱼被捕食者捕获。我们最近表明，这些细胞可能在免疫环境中进化，以最大限度地减少皮肤损伤的影响，并且细胞的警报功能是次要的，因为选择有利于猎物对附近个体最近被捕获的信息做出反应。我们将继续这项令人兴奋的工作，特别是测试鱼类是否会增加它们的警报细胞投资，作为暴露于UVB辐射时的保护措施。该提案的最后重点将是审查金属对鱼类对捕食者的化学感觉识别的影响，从而将风险评估的行为生态学与金属污染直接联系起来。随着加拿大采矿业的不断扩大，了解金属对水生生态系统的潜在有害影响尤为重要。在这个建议的一个主要重点是对HQP的培训，我将通过这个赠款周期的过程中培养5名博士生。

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.