The interaction of food motivation and experience in the ontogeny of chemoreception in crayfish snakes
Section snippets
Subjects
Neonates born in captivity to wild-caught gravid females were used. Thirteen pregnant female Regina septemvittata and six pregnant female R. grahamii were collected from field sites in Blount and Knox Counties Tennessee and St Martin Parish, Louisiana, U.S.A., respectively, during May and June 1996–1998. All snakes were collected under scientific collecting permits issued by each state. Following capture, the gravid females were transported to the Reptile Ethology Laboratory at the University
Strikes towards prey stimuli
Strikes were only recorded towards hard and soft crayfish stimuli. Strikes towards the soft crayfish odour occurred at all ages, regardless of food experience (Fig. 1). There was a positive correlation between age and number of snakes striking at soft crayfish stimulus in food-naïve snakes (Pearson correlation coefficient: r = 0.99, P = 0.017) but not in food-experienced snakes (r1 = 0.00, P = 0.5). However, there was no difference between frequency distributions of strikes for food-experienced and
Species-characteristic chemosensory responses to prey chemical stimuli
Both naïve R. grahamii and R. septemvittata responded significantly more to crayfish chemicals than to any other prey stimulus. This increased level of response matches well with dietary studies that report that both species feed almost exclusively on soft (freshly moulted) crayfish throughout their lives (Branson and Baker, 1974, Seigel, 1992) and supports the original study by Burghardt (1968). These data also support Burghardt's findings that these species can chemically distinguish between
Acknowledgments
We thank Paul Andreadis, Frank Burbrink, Dan Cunningham, Matthew Lanier, Douglas Rossman and Joe Slowinski for their help in collecting pregnant females in either Tennessee or Louisiana, Jay Huner for kindly giving us permission to collect Regina grahamii at the Crawfish Research Center, University of Southwestern Louisiana, and Donna Layne, Mark Krause, Barbara Manzer and Casey Newton for their help in the Laboratory. We also thank Dorcas Schaeffer for providing veterinary care, University of
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2016, ZoologyCitation Excerpt :Laboratory studies on a variety of snake species have shown that newborn snakes exhibit innate chemosensory recognition of prey chemical cues (Burghardt, 1967, 1969; Clark, 2004a), can effectively strike and envenomate prey and follow chemical trails left by those prey (Scudder et al., 1992), recognize and exhibit species-typical responses to predators (Weldon and Burghardt, 1979), and exhibit species-typical aggressive mimicry (caudal luring) (Reiserer and Schuett, 2008). However, a variety of studies have also shown that snakes modify their predatory behavior based on experience (Arnold, 1978; Waters and Burghardt, 2005; Mehta, 2008), including rattlesnakes (Clark, 2004b). Thus, it is likely that at least some aspects of predatory behavior might improve with age in the wild.
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G. M. Burghardt is at the Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996, U.S.A.