Meeting Abstract

61.4  Jan. 7  Decorating behavior and predation: new insights from polychaetes and crustaceans BERKE, Sarah K*; WOODIN, Sarah A; Univ. of South Carolina; Univ. of South Carolina berke@biol.sc.edu

Decorating behavior, in which animals actively attach foreign material to their bodies or their structures, occurs in 25% of the major metazoan phyla. Decorating is commonly assumed to provide camouflage, and strong experimental evidence supports this hypothesis in some systems. We present evidence that camouflage may not be important in other decorating systems: a tube-decorating polychaete (Diopatra cuprea) and a decorator crab (Oregonia gracilis). We manipulated the tube decoration of Diopatra in the field, quantifying rates of damage to the tubes as measures of predation attempts. Removing tube decoration had no effect on predator attack rates, suggesting that Diopatra�s decoration does not interfere with predator recognition of its prey. Similarly, we manipulated the decoration or Oregonia in the field and the laboratory. Field tethering experiments and laboratory predation assays produced little evidence that decoration decreases predation risk for these crabs, although there were exceptions. These results are discussed in the context of other systems, with an eye towards identifying system properties which make camouflage likely or unlikely.