Affiliation:
1. Laboratory of Insect Ecology, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto UniversityKyoto 606-8502, Japan
2. Laboratory of Forest Ecology, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto UniversityKyoto 606-8502, Japan
Abstract
Death feigning is fairly common in a number of taxa, but the adaptive significance of this behaviour is still unclear and has seldom been tested. To date, all proposed hypotheses have assumed that prey manage to escape predation by sending a death-mimicking signal, although death-feigning postures are markedly different from those of dead animals. Moreover, the efficacy of this technique may largely depend on the foraging mode of the predator; death feigning seldom works with sit-and-wait predators that make the decision to attack and consume prey within a very brief time. We examined whether death feigning in the pygmy grasshopper
Criotettix japonicus
Haan was an inducible defence behaviour against the frog
Rana nigromaculata
, a sit-and-wait, gape-limited predator. The characteristic posture assumed by the grasshopper during death feigning enlarges its functional body size by stretching each of three body parts (pronotum, hind legs and lateral spines) in three different directions, thereby making it difficult for the predator to swallow the prey. Our result is the first consistent explanation for why death-mimicking animals do not always mimic the posture of dead animals.
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine
Reference27 articles.
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2. Defensive behaviour in Ghanaian praying mantids
3. Edmunds M Defence in animals: a survey of anti-predator defences. 1974 Harlow UK:Longman.
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