Sneakers take a predation risk to gain sneaking opportunities
Section snippets
Methods
The field studies were conducted using SCUBA diving from May to July 2018 and 2019 at Morode Beach, Ehime, Japan (33°00′N, 132°50′E). The observer first searched for territorial males and spawning females along a rocky coastline (depth <3.5 m) in the morning (0800–1200). The triplefin blenny is reproductively active during these hours, with territorial males remaining in the vicinity of their spawning sites to mate with females, or to defend them against rivals and wait for ready-to-spawn
Results
For the AD model, most or all of the top model set included the interactions between head orientation and mating state, and between tactic and mating state (Fig. 2a, Table 1). In particular, both sneaker and territorial males were more likely to be wary of the approaching predator, regardless of head orientation, when not mating, whereas they were less wary about their back view during mating. Interactions between tactic and mating state were included in the top model set, but further model
Discussion
This study showed that mating activity negatively influenced the ability of male triplefin blennies to detect predators, supporting my hypothesis; however, this influence was limited to when the predator stimulus approached from the back view. Furthermore, contrary to my prediction, the ability seemed to be weakly related to reproductive tactics. There was no obvious difference in wariness to the predator stimulus between tactics in both mating states. Thus, although the different categories of
Acknowledgments
I thank Masanori Kohda, Satoshi Awata and local residents for their kind support in the field. I thank the three anonymous referees for statistical advice and constructive and helpful comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI, grant numbers 15K18614 and 18K06427).
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