Meeting Abstract
66.2 Sunday, Jan. 6 Tadpole schooling and parental care in an aquatic-breeding tropical frog, Leptodactylus insularum. HURME, KJ; Univ. of Connecticut kristiina.hurme@uconn.edu
Group-living is a widespread phenomenon among animals that increases survival through increased predator detection and dilution of risk. Alternatively, parental care may increase offspring survival through predator defense, food provisioning or nest building. Despite high levels of predation in aquatic environments, parental care of tadpoles is rare, probably because most adult anurans are terrestrial whereas tadpoles are aquatic. Furthermore, attendance of the aquatic larval stage would be difficult without a strong schooling tendency of the tadpoles. Within the Neotropical genus Leptodactylus, there exists an adaptive tendency towards tadpole schooling and female care and the novel use of stereotyped signals in female-offspring communication. Leptodactylus insularum tadpoles form dense aggregations that experience intense predation from terrestrial and aquatic predators. By remaining hidden in a large group of individuals, L. insularum tadpoles may maintain high levels of activity and spend relatively more time foraging than solitary tadpoles, thereby increasing metabolic rates and reducing the amount of time spent in the larval stage to 19 days. However, these conspicuous groups may also attract predators, and adult females may remain with their tadpoles to defend against predators. Females may attend the eggs and tadpoles and lead these schools to different microhabitats in temporary ponds. The function of this attendance is unclear and I have observed a large amount of variation within and between populations in the amount of care provided. I will address multiple hypotheses about the effect of group size on predation risk and oxygen availability in tadpole schools, the biology of parental care. I will discuss current research on growth rates and lung development in tadpoles, the effect of variation in female attendance on offspring growth and survival, and parent-offspring communication.
