Meeting Abstract
All animals need to evaluate social situations and respond with appropriate behavior that results in a beneficial outcome. Inappropriate social decisions can potentially result in outcomes that reduce reproductive fitness. Despite the importance of adaptive behavioral output, little is known about how social decisions are made in the brain, especially in neonates. Research across vertebrates has identified two key neuropeptides: vasopressin, which mediates the “fight or flight” response, and oxytocin, which facilitates pair bonding and affiliation. We tested the role of these neuropeptides in mediating neonate social decision-making in tadpoles of the Mimetic poison frog, Ranitomeya imitator. In this species, tadpoles beg parents for an egg meal and aggressively fight conspecific tadpoles in defense of resources. A previous study linked vasopressin to aggression and begging behavior in tadpoles. We tested the role of both neuropeptides in three different behavioral paradigms where tadpoles begged to a stimulus female, fought with conspecific tadpoles, and displayed neither behavior when a novel object was introduced. After quantifying the begging behavior displayed by the tadpoles, the tadpole brains were isolated and immunohistochemistry was used to visualize a marker of neural activation (pS6), oxytocin, and vasopressin. While we found a role for vasopressin in tadpole behavior, activation of oxytocin neurons did not change. My current work is focusing on brain specific knock-down of these nonapeptides to determine the functional role of these behaviors. Overall, this work suggests that vasopressin, but not oxytocin, regulates affiliative and aggressive tadpole behaviors.
