Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 167, September 2020, Pages 255-262
Animal Behaviour

Sneakers take a predation risk to gain sneaking opportunities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.07.020Get rights and content

The act of mating increases predation risk by hindering an animal's ability to detect and escape from predators efficiently. Here, a novel issue of how alternative reproductive tactics differently influence these abilities was examined in the triplefin blenny, Enneapterygius etheostoma. A slow predator approach was presented to males with different mating tactics (territorial and sneaking) and mating states (mating and nonmating), totalling four combinations. Predator–male distance when males became wary was independent of tactics. The distance was shorter for mating males than nonmating males, but only when males faced away from the stimulus. Thus, mating state diminished the capacity for detecting danger similarly for both tactics. Predator–male distance when males initiated the escape was well predicted by mating state in sneakers, with shorter distances for mating individuals; however, the same was not obvious in territorial males. Consequently, sneakers escaped later than territorial males during mating, but both males escaped at a similar distance from the predator when in a nonmating state. Instead, mating territorial males returned to the spawning sites earlier than nonmating males. Overall, sneakers made bold escape decisions, whereas territorial males became risk prone when returning to the spawning sites. In conclusion, sneaking males pay a predation cost when mating.

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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