Keeping eyes peeled: guppies exposed to chemical alarm cue are more responsive to ambiguous visual cues.

ABSTRACT:

Abstract

Information received from the visual and chemical senses is qualitatively different. For prey species in aquatic environments, visual cues are spatially and temporally reliable but risky as the prey and predator must often be in close proximity. Chemical cues, by contrast, can be distorted by currents or linger and thus provide less reliable spatial and temporal information, but can be detected from a safe distance. Chemical cues are therefore often the first detected and may provide a context in which prey respond to subsequent ambiguous cues ("context hypothesis"). Depending on this context, early chemical cues may also alert prey to attend to imminent cues in other sensory modalities ("alerting hypothesis"). In the context of predation risk, for example, it is intuitive

SUBMITTER: Stephenson JF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4788695 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature