Meeting Abstract
The complexity of an animal’s interaction with its physical and/or social environment is associated with behavioral flexibility and cognitive complexity. While this relationship has been studied extensively in birds and mammals, we know comparatively little about cognitive ecology in amphibians. We examined differences in cognitive ability in two species of frog with divergent natural histories. Poison frogs are diurnal, territorial, and utilize spatially distributed resources during parental care. Túngara frogs are nocturnal and use ephemeral puddles to breed in a lek-type mating system. Using standardized laboratory tasks, we find that green-and-black poison frogs (Dendrobates auratus) prefer to use spatial cues while túngara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) prefer local cues. Further, green-and-black poison frogs display greater behavioral flexibility than túngara frogs in a reversal learning task. Finally, green-and-black poison frogs are capable of using true spatial memory to solve a modified Morris water maze. Spatial memory and behavioral flexibility are associated with hippocampal function in mammals. Thus, we used RNAseq to examine species differences in the medial pallium, the amphibian homolog of the hippocampus. We found that genes related to learning and memory, neurogenesis, and synaptic plasticity were upregulated in green-and-black poison frogs, while genes related to apoptosis were upregulated in túngara frogs. While there are many reasons that these two species may differ in medial pallium gene expression, such differences provide an opportunity to identify candidate genes that enable greater behavioral flexibility and cognitive complexity in green-and-black in poison frogs.
