Affiliation:
1. Department of Terrestrial Zoology, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, PO Box 9517, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
Abstract
Autotomy of body parts offers various prey animals immediate benefits of survival in compensation for considerable costs. I found that a land snail
Satsuma caliginosa
of populations coexisting with a snail-eating snake
Pareas iwasakii
survived the snake predation by autotomizing its foot, whereas those out of the snake range rarely survived. Regeneration of a lost foot completed in a few weeks but imposed a delay of shell growth. Imprints of autotomy were found in greater than 10 per cent of
S. caliginosa
in the snake range but in only less than 1 per cent out of it, simultaneously demonstrating intense predation by the snakes and high efficiency of autotomy for surviving snake predation in the wild. However, in experiments, mature
S. caliginosa
performed autotomy less frequently. Instead of the costly autotomy, they can use defensive denticles on the inside of their shell apertures. Owing to the constraints from the additive growth of shells, most pulmonate snails can produce these denticles only when they have fully grown up. Thus, this developmental constraint limits the availability of the modified aperture, resulting in ontogenetic switching of the alternative defences. This study illustrates how costs of adaptation operate in the evolution of life-history strategies under developmental constraints
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine
Cited by
19 articles.
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