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Cuckoo catfish in search of foster parents

16 May 2018 / wvanstrien

Cichlid mothers see through the deceit, but pay a high price

The cuckoo catfish tries to dump its eggs among those of fish of the cichlid family. Cichlids usually avoid being used as foster parents, Radim Blažek and colleagues report, but by becoming too cautious, they often reject their own eggs as well.

Just as the cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of songbirds, manipulating them into raising their young, the cuckoo catfish transfers the care for its offspring to other fish. Several species of the cichlid family are the involuntary foster parents of this ‘underwater cuckoo’. Cichlid mothers breed their eggs in the buccal cavity to protect them from predators. They also carry the newly hatched young in their mouths, and when the fry are able to swim around freely, they continue to pick them up in case of danger during the first few weeks.

Bad ending

The cuckoo catfish (Synodontis multipunctatus) exploits the dedicated behaviour of these mouthbreeders and approaches them while they are spawning. The female of a mating couple repeatedly lays a few eggs and collects them quickly in her mouth. She then picks up sperm from the male to fertilize the eggs in her mouth.

When a group of cuckoo catfish disturbs such spawning pair, the cichlids will chase off the invaders. Still, the catfish often manage to eat some cichlid eggs and place a number of fertilized eggs of their own among the cichlid eggs. The cichlid mother will gather also the catfish eggs in her mouth.

Then, things can go wrong for her own brood. The eggs of the cuckoo catfish are smaller than the eggs of the cichlid mother and hatch earlier, and the young catfish will devour their stepsiblings. Later, when the young parasites are released, the host mother will continue to protect them as if they were her own offspring.

Defence

Now, Radim Blažek and colleagues show that the cichlids are not entirely defenceless against the brood parasite. The cuckoo catfish only occurs in Lake Tanganyika in Central Africa, and the many cichlid species that inhabit the lake have been dealing with this enemy for millions of years. The researchers investigated how one of them, Simochromis diagramma, responds to the behaviour of the cuckoo catfish. They compared its response with the behaviour of cichlids from other African lakes, which have never been in contact with the underwater cuckoo.

They maintained different cichlid species separately in aquariums with a group of catfish and first assessed how often the catfish succeeds in imposing its eggs to the cichlids.

When housed with Simochromis diagramma, the cichlid from Lake Tanganyika, the cuckoo catfish was much less successful than with cichlids from other lakes. Only 5 percent of the Tanganyika females were found to have parasite’s eggs in their mouths 12 hours after spawning. Apparently, because of the shared evolutionary history, this cichlid species has learned to resist the brood parasite.

Rejection

To find out how Tanganyika cichlids deal with the cuckoo catfish in more detail, the biologists then artificially infected breeding cichlid females with parasites by injecting six fertilized eggs of the cuckoo catfish into their mouths. They used two cichlid species: Simochromis diagramma from Lake Tanganyika and Haplochromis aeneocolor from Lake George in Uganda. Next day, they determined whether the females had retained the foreign eggs. Also, in additional experiments, they assessed how often artificially parasitized females eventually released young cuckoo catfish and / or their own young.

The cichlid from Lake George was easily misled: only 7 percent of the females rejected the introduced parasite’s eggs instead of retaining them. As a consequence, the eggs of cuckoo catfish had a high survival chance: 86 percent developed successfully.

The Tanganyika cichlid, however, was not fooled into raising foreign young: nearly all females (90 percent) rejected foreign eggs and only 13 percent of the cuckoo catfish eggs survived. In those cases where the cuckoo catfish eggs hatched, individual experience reduced the damage. Cichlid females that had already given birth to young catfish earlier now managed to save some of their own young.

High price

The cichlids from Lake Tanganyika have learned to cope with the parasite and to see through their deceit. They rarely pick up foreign eggs. Nevertheless, the presence of the cuckoo catfish lowers their reproductive success because, if these cichlids detect foreign eggs, they become so choosy that they also reject some of their own eggs, as the experiments showed. So, they pay a high price to keep the parasite out.

There are about one hundred species of brood parasites among birds. In fish, the cuckoo catfish is the only one known to display cuckoo behaviour.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Cuckoo catfish Synodontis multipunctatus. ©Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Brno (Czech Republic)

See a short video documentary of National Geographic on cuckoo catfish

Source:
Blažek, R., M, Polačik, C. Smith, M. Honza, A. Meyer & M. Reichard, 2018. Success of cuckoo catfish brood parasitism reflects coevolutionary history and individual experience of their cichlid hosts. Science Advances 4: eaar4380. Doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aar4380

Protected and aggressive mimics

9 May 2018 / wvanstrien

Young false cleanerfish relies on disguise to bite other fishes

It is beneficial to look like cleanerfish, Misaki Fujisawa and colleagues show. By mimicking cleanerfish, false cleanerfish prevent attack by predatory fish. Also, they can approach other fishes and take a bite – but only small individuals show such behaviour.

The bluestreak cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus, lives on coral reefs where it offers cleaning services: the cleanerfish removes blood sucking parasites from the skin of other fishes. There is also a pretender, the false cleanerfish Aspidontus taeniatus. It has the same appearance as the cleaner wrasse, but it does not clean other fishes.

Misaki Fujisawa and colleagues wondered why it resembles the bluestreak cleaner wrasse. The disguise, or mimicry, helps to escape from predatory fish, which don’t consume useful cleaner fish and don’t detect the deceit. So there is a protective function. But maybe the mimicry has a second benefit. False cleaners may be able to approach fishes undisturbed in order to attack them. In that case, the disguise would also enable aggressive behaviour.

To find out, the researchers observed the behaviour of the false cleaners in the coral reefs around Sesoko Island in Japan.

Biting fins

The false cleanerfish mainly feeds on benthic animals; it bites off pieces of the tentacles of tubeworms or soft parts of the boring clam. In addition, it bites the fins of other fishes and steals eggs from the nests of damselfish (Pomacentridae).

The resemblance to the bluestreak cleaner wrasse is profitable for fin biting, as it gives the false cleaner a chance to approach unsuspecting victims, even if it behaves a little differently. Whereas a cleaner wrasse invites clients for a cleaning service by performing a zigzag dance, a false cleaner does not: it usually approaches its victims from behind, makes a sudden dart and bites off a piece of the caudal fin. So, the disguise indeed seems to have a second function, next to the protection that it offers the false cleaners against predatory fish.

Less dangerous

But only small individuals rely on their disguise to aggressively approach other fishes, as Fujisawa shows. As the false cleaners grow bigger, they continue feeding on benthic animals, but in addition to exploiting this main food source, they gradually switch from fin biting to egg predation. To raid nests, they often form small groups, and then the mimicry loses its effect, as cleanerfish always operate solitary or with their mate.

The false cleaners have good reason to change feeding tactics, as fish eggs are more nutritious than pieces of fin. But for small false cleaners it is difficult and risky to raid nests, because the eggs are guarded by damselfish parents, which will attack each enemy fiercely and without hesitation. Large false cleaners can elude attacks by swimming fast, but for small fish this is too dangerous. Biting fins is more feasible to them – thanks to their innocent appearance.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Two adult cleaners (middle and right) and an adult mimic (left) at Sesoko Island, Okinawa, Japan. ©Misaki Fujisawa

Sources:
Fujisawa, M., Y. Sakai & T. Kuwamura, 2018. Aggressive mimicry of the cleaner wrasse by Aspidontus taeniatus functions mainly for small blennies. Ethology, 19 april online. Doi: 10.1111/eth.12743
Cheney, K.L., A.S.Grutter & R. Bshary, 2014. Geographical variation in the benefits obtained by a coral reef fish mimic. Animal Behaviour 88: 85-90. Doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.11.006
Kuwamura, T., 1983. Reexamination on the aggressive mimicry of the cleaner wrasse Labroides dimidiatus by the blenny Aspidontus taeniatus (Pisces; Perciformes). Journal of Ethology 1: 22-33. Doi: 10.1007/BF02347828

Why dad leaves his family

1 May 2018 / wvanstrien

Conflict between moult and care in Hooded Warbler

When parental care and feather replacement overlap in time, a Hooded Warbler male may abandon his family, forcing his mate to provide all remaining care for the young. The mother can handle it, as Ronald Mumme points out.

Migratory birds are under time pressure during the breeding season. Not only do they have to raise young, they also have to replace their feathers and store fat reserves to prepare for fall migration to their wintering area. Those tasks – caring, moulting and storing fat – may be in conflict.

The Hooded Warbler, which spends the summer in North America, has a very hard time, Ronald Mumme notices. Couples produce two clutches per season. The female incubates the eggs and when the young have hatched, both parents will provision them. The parents have to perform this job for about four weeks, for only then the young are independent. Hooded Warblers feed on winged insects, especially flies and mosquitoes, which they pick from the air. Before the young of the second clutch reach independency, it may already be time for the parents to initiate moult.

Indispensable tail

The problem now is that Hooded Warblers use their tail as foraging tool. The outer tail feathers have white spots that become visible when a bird spreads the feathers and that stand out against the olive-green background. By flicking its tail, a bird flushes flying insects hidden in the vegetation and captures them in the air.

But during moult, those feathers are shed simultaneously and a bird has to spend a week without a tail. It then has difficulty capturing insects, while it needs extra food because the moult is energetically demanding. And so it may happen that one of the parents leaves the family because it cannot obtain sufficient food for itself and the chicks, especially if they are so young that they cannot catch any food for themselves. Mostly, the father deserts, because males initiate moult on average two weeks earlier than females. Young, inexperienced fathers are more likely to leave than older dads.

Why males initiate moult earlier than females is not known yet.

Abandoned females

When the father deserts at the end of the season, the mother is left responsible for all remaining parental care. But apparently, she has no big problems: the chance that such a female survives the winter does not seem to decrease; the birds spend wintertime along the Caribbean coast of Central America. And in the next breeding season, she probably will choose the same mate, even though he had left her.

Willy van Strien

Photo: A male Hooded Warbler delivers food to his nestlings © Ron Mumme

Sources:
Mumme, R.L., 2018. The trade-off between molt and parental care in Hooded Warblers: simultaneous rectrix molt and uniparental desertion of late-season young. The Auk 135: 427-438. Doi: 10.1642/AUK-17-240.1
Mumme, R.L., 2014. White tail spots and tail-flicking behavior enhance foraging performance in the Hooded Warbler. The Auk 131: 141-149. Doi: 10.1642/AUK-13-199.1

Cooling down

26 April 2018 / wvanstrien

Blowfly blows bubbles to prevent overheating

A blowfly often extrudes a liquid bubble between its mouth parts and then takes it back. By exhibiting this bubbling behaviour, it gets rid of excess heat, Guilherme Gomes and colleagues show.

How can a buzzing blowfly avoid getting overheated? Few people will ever have wondered, but as it happens, Guilherme Gomes and colleagues did. And they discovered that the oriental latrine blowfly Chrysomya megacephala manages to lower its body temperature by blowing a bubble.

At high air temperatures, a blowfly can expel a drop of liquid out of its oral cavity and hold it with its mouthparts. As some liquid evaporates, the droplet will rapidly cool down, whereupon the fly will take it in. The cycle is often repeated, and a droplet may tidally move out and back up to six times until eventually the fly swallows it and its body temperature decreases. The liquid is a complex mix of fluids derived from ingested meals and saliva.

Daytime and night-time

The blowfly applies this trick during the day when ambient temperature exceeds 25 °C. At that temperature, the animal is warmed-up and busy, so that its muscles produce a lot of heat, which makes cooling necessary. When it gets really hot, above 30 °C, the fly becomes inactive and no longer generates heat. It then stops blowing bubbles.

At night, it bubbles more than during the day to stay cool, in order to decrease its metabolism and save energy.

If air humidity is high, the liquid will not evaporate well and a bubble will not cool down. If the fly still expels a drop, it will not re-ingest it, but spit it out instead.

Small animals only

Cooling down by extruding a droplet is only feasible in small animals, and a number of insect species seem to exhibit such behaviour. For larger animals, it is impossible to produce and handle a liquid drop that is large enough for a cooling effect. To us, it would make no sense to trying it – fortunately. We cool down by sweating, which is impossible to an insect because of its chitinous exoskeleton and wax covering.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Blowfly Chrysomya megacephala. gbohne (via Flickr, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Source:
Gomes, G., R. Köberle, C.J. von Zuben & D. V. Andrade, 2018. Droplet bubbling evaporatively cools a blowfly. Scientific Reports 8: 5464. Doi: 10.1038 / s41598-018-23670-2

Help when needed

20 April 2018 / wvanstrien

Crab spider makes itself useful on infested flower

Lying in ambush on a flower, a crab spider will grab every visitor and eat it. Its victim may be a useful guest, such as a bee, as well as a harmful one. In buckler mustard, the presence of a crab spider turns out to be beneficial if flowers are infested by caterpillars, Anina Knauer and colleagues show.

Crab spiders have an effective way to acquire food. They reside in a flower, usually inconspicuously as their colour matches that of the flower, and wait for visitors to arrive. They grab them with the two pairs of large legs to which their name refers, kill them with a poisonous bite and eat them. They can handle prey that is much larger than they are. It is a disadvantage for a plant when such a spider settles on a flower, you would guess, for many flower visitors that they hunt are useful visitors, such as bees that pollinate the plant to enable it to set seed; it would be a disaster if those pollinators could not do their job.

But Anina Knauer and colleagues show that the presence of a crab spider can be a blessing. That is because a flower also gets visitors with bad intentions, and a resident crab spider can eliminate them. Therefore, they discovered, a flower will attract crab spiders in case of unwelcome visitors.

Seed set

The researchers investigated how the presence of the crab spider Thomisus onustus affects the fitness of the plant it usually occurs on, buckler mustard (Biscutella laevigata), an alpine herb with yellow flowers and fruits that look like spectacles. The plant interacts with several insect species that are potential prey for the spider. The scent of the flowers attracts bees that take care for pollination in exchange for nectar. But the seed setting often fails because the flowers are consumed by caterpillars of the diamondback moth (Plutella xylostella). What happens when a crab spider is present?

The researchers conducted experiments in which they placed three caterpillars on flowers of plants with or without a crab spider every morning and counted the caterpillars in the evening. On plants with a crab spider, most of the caterpillars disappeared – apparently, they were eaten by the spider -, and after four weeks, as a consequence, those plants had suffered much less damage than plants without a spider and developed seeds normally. The crab spider rescued the flowers.

In the field, the researchers also found, plants call the voracious spider for help when the flowers are infested. This call is chemical: infested flowers emit increased amounts of one of the scent compounds, beta-ocimene. The crab spider is attracted by that compound and will settle on such flowers. Indeed, a larger proportion of plants with caterpillars is occupied by a crab spider compared to plants without a spider. So, plant and spider have a mutualistic relationship: an infested plant asks for help and receives it, while the spider that comes to the rescue gets a meal.

Bees

But what about the bees, which are the most important pollinators? Aren’t they in danger when a spider is present? They hardly are, as it turns out. They usually detect the presence of a spider on a flower, despite its camouflage, and avoid a visit, and the spider almost exclusively feeds on caterpillars. Still, despite the reduced visit rates of bees, the flowers set seed. Apparently, there is no lack of pollen. The presence of the spider therefore turns out to be beneficial for plants that are infested by caterpillars.

High in the mountains Thomisus onustus does not occur, while buckler mustard does. Upon attack by caterpillars, plants of highland populations increase the amount of beta-ocimene to a much less extent than plants of lowland populations.

Willy van Strien

Photos:
Large: Thomisus onustus (not on buckler mustard). Paco Gómez (via Flickr, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)
Small: buckler mustard. Isidre blanc (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

Source:
Knauer, A.C., M. Bakhtiari & F.P. Schiestl, 2018. Crab spiders impact floral-signal evolution indirectly through removal of florivores. Nature Communications 9: 1367. Doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03792-x

Inequality

12 April 2018 / wvanstrien

Red-capped plover invests more in young of opposite sex

Fathers care more when they have daughters, mothers care more when they have sons. Such is the case in the red-capped plover, in which both parents divide the tasks of raising their two chicks, as Daniel Lees and colleagues witnessed.

In the red-capped plover, a bird that inhabits coastal areas of Australia, parents divide the care for their young. The nest is a shallow scrape on the ground wherein the female usually lays two eggs, open and exposed. The eggs are well camouflaged thanks to their yellowish-brown colour and black spots. They have to be, otherwise they would be easily detected during daytime by visually-foraging predators, such as the little raven. The female also has a protective coloration. But the male has a bright red head to impress females and help him acquire a high-quality mate. When he would incubate the eggs, his ornamentation would disclose their presence to predators.

Red fox

In order to prevent this from happening, the birds have divided the breeding duties properly, Kasun Ekanayake and colleagues showed. During the day, the inconspicuous female breeds and only at night the male will take over. The one enemy that forages in the dark, the red fox, uses olfactory cues, and for this peril, it does not matter whether the father or the mother is sitting on the nest. Many clutches fall prey to the red fox, which isn’t a native species of Australia, but has been introduced and now poses a major threat to many bird and mammal species.

As soon as the young red-capped plovers have hatched, they are mobile and they have to feed themselves. One of the parents is with them to keep them warm, to warn of danger and to lead them to places with food. The chicks fledge at approximately 35 days.

During the first few weeks after hatching, the chicks, which are camouflaged, are very vulnerable to predators. In that period, it is mainly the mother who accompanies them. Later, when the chicks become able to escape from danger, the father gradually takes over the care until they are independent. So, the care for the young birds seems to be equally divided between parents.

Wedding market

But there still is some inequality, as Daniel Lees and colleagues point out. For the division of care between parents, it matters whether they have daughters or sons.

The mother, who takes care of the chicks during the first weeks, will decrease her contribution over time at a lower rate when both young are males; in that case she continues to invest more than she would do if she had had two daughters or a son and a daughter. And the father, who gradually takes over her job, will provide more care if both young are female.

So, both parents care more for young of the opposite sex. No difference is to be seen between male and female chicks, and the researchers needed a blood sample to be able to determine the sex of the young. Apparently, however, the birds can distinguish between sons and daughters and treat them differently.

How to explain this? The researchers suggest that the parents may provide more care to young of the opposite sex because these young will not be rivals later on, on the wedding market. Fathers will then have to compete for attractive partners with their sons and mothers with their daughters. It is an possibility that still has to be investigated.

Willy van Strien

Photos:
Large: Red-capped plover, male. ©Daniel Lees
Small: Red-capped plover, chick. Benjamint444 (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources:
Lees, D., C.D.H. Sherman, K. Kostoglou, L.X.L. Tan, G.S. Maguire, P. Dann & M.A. Weston, 2018. Plover parents care more for young of the opposite sex. Behavioral Ecology, online April 5. Doi: 10.1093/beheco/ary052
Ekanayake, K.B., M.A. Weston, D.G. Nimmo, G.S. Maguire, J.A. Endler & C. Küpper, 2015. The bright incubate at night: sexual dichromatism and adaptive incubation division in an open-nesting shorebird. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282: 20143026. Doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.3026

Unrewarded services

6 April 2018 / wvanstrien

Orchid utilizes fungi and fruit flies without paying

The orchid Gastrodia pubilabiata lives at the expense of other species. It steals sugars from fungi, which also attract fruit flies that provide pollination service, as Kenji Suetsugu shows, without receiving any reward in return.

While most plants produce sugars from carbon dioxide using energy from sunlight in a process called photosynthesis, the orchid Gastrodia pubilabiata leaves the job to others. The small and inconspicuous plant, which grows in Japan and Taiwan, does not have green leaves, as it lacks chloroplasts, the cell organelles that conduct photosynthesis. With its roots, it steals sugars from the underground hyphae of a number of mushroom forming fungi species; the fungi obtained these sugars from dead organic material. The fungi get nothing in return.

And while most plants produce nectar as a food resource for insects (or other animals) that pollinate the flowers in return, this orchid doesn’t. To be pollinated, it exploits fruit flies (Drosophila species) without rewarding them.

Deceived

The flies need fermenting fruit or decaying mushrooms to lay their eggs in, and their larvae will consume that stuff. Apparently, the brown-coloured flowers of Gastrodia pubilabiata smell like fermenting and decaying substrates, as the flies are sometimes deceived into laying their eggs on the flowers. Consequently, the larvae will find no suitable food and die. But the orchid has been served. While visiting a flower, the flies pick up pollinia, masses of pollen grains, which they deliver to the next flower they visit, thereby pollinating that flower.

Service

The orchid thus takes nutrients from mushrooms and is pollinated by fruit flies, and neither of these partners receives any reward for its services. Both are victims of a parasitic and deceptive plant.

Now Kenji Suetsugu shows that mushroom-forming fungi still provide another service. Old mushrooms attract fruit flies that have to lay their eggs, and upon arrival, they will also visit the orchid flowers that mimic fermenting and decaying material. Suetsugu conducted experiments in which he removed decaying Mycena mushrooms from the orchids’ proximity or added extra specimens; Mycena species are the main victims of theft by the plant. He found that the more decaying mushrooms are around, the more pollen is removed from and delivered to orchid flowers by flies that are misled, and the more seeds are produced.

So, the fungi not only function as food providers, but also as magnets that attract pollinators – without reward.

Willy van Strien

Source:
Suetsugu, K., 2018. Achlorophyllous orchid can utilize fungi not only for nutritional demands but also pollinator attraction. Ecology, online March 25. Doi: 10.1002/ecy.2170

Deceit, abuse and benefits

28 March 2018 / wvanstrien

Complex relationships between arum, blowflies and lizard

With its smell of rotting carrion, the dead-horse arum Helicodiceros muscivorus is irresistible to blowflies and a lizard. The blowflies will be abused, the lizard benefits. Ana Pérez-Cembranos and colleagues unraveled these complex relationships.

On islands in the Mediterranean Sea, a plant occurs with a very bad smell, the dead-horse arum, Helicodiceros muscivorus. Its odour contains chemical components that are also emitted by a decomposing dead animal. It irresistible to a female blowfly searching for carcasses to lay her eggs on to make sure that the carnivorous larvae will have food. The dead-horse arum takes advantage of that behaviour.

The plants release their odour on the first day of blooming. Blowflies that perceive the smell cannot ignore it. Upon approaching the source, they find a pink or red curved bract, the spathe, with the hairy end of the spadix (inflorescence), which produces the smell. When they land, the spadix turns out to be warm. To blowflies, the imitation is perfect: this is rotting carrion. Guided by the heat, they crawl into the tube that is formed by the base of the spathe around the lower part of the spadix, which bears female and male florets.

Trapped

Once inside, the blowflies don’t find what they need, which is decaying meat. But if they want to leave, they cannot. Spikes on the spadix keep the door closed. The blowflies are trapped.

Unintentionally, they provide a service to the arum during their imprisonment in the floral chamber. The female flowers at the bottom of the spadix are blooming this first day, and blowflies that had been misled by the arum before, now deliver the pollen that they picked up on that occasion. The plant has its female flowers pollinated.

The next day, the female flowers have faded and the male flowers are mature. The stench and the heat disappear, the spikes wilt and the blowflies escape, and while passing the male flowers, they are loaded with pollen. And here is the second benefit to the plant: the blowflies take the pollen with them to female flowers elsewhere – if at least they find another foul smelling arum on their way and are again misled into visiting it.

So, the blowflies are coerced to pollinate the dead-horse arum without receiving any reward such as nectar. On the contrary: they lose time that they should have spent on searching for genuine carcasses.

Basking

Now Ana Pérez-Cembranos and colleagues show that the Balearic lizard Podarcis lilfordi is also misled by the arum’s odour. The animal is omnivorous and sometimes forages on carcasses, which are also attractive as a heat source; lizards are cold-blooded and when the weather is cool, they may use a rotting carcass as a perching site for basking. In addition, they capture the blowflies that arrive at the cadaver in search for a site for oviposition.

The lizards respond to the smell of the dead-horse arum as they do to the smell of a carcass and will approach the source. If that turns out to be a dead-hors arum instead of a dead animal body, they will not find a meat meal, but they do find a basking place and blowflies, which they take from the spathe or grab from the tube. The lizards thus take away a number of pollinators, but, according to the researchers, enough are left to ensure pollination.

Fruits

So, the lizard isn’t an enemy of the arum. And after the flowering period, when fruits are ripe, a mutualism even develops between both. The lizards consume the fruits and disperse the seeds in their faeces; passage through the lizard’s intestine increases the probability of germination. On Aire Island, a the small island off the southeastern coast of Menorca, where the research was done, the dead-horse arum is a newcomer. It is estimated to have grown there for only about fifty years. In that period, it spread rapidly over the island and nowadays it locally occurs in great densities. That is because of the lizard, which has learned to eat the fruits and now is the main disperser of the seeds, the researchers think.

Willy van Strien

Sources:
Pérez-Cembranos, A., V. Pérez-Mellado & W.E. Cooper, 2018. Balearic lizards use chemical cues from a complex deceptive mimicry to capture attracted pollinators. Ethology 124: 260-268. Doi: 10.1111/eth.12728
Angioy, A-M., M. C. Stensmyr, I. Urru, M. Puliafito, I. Collu & B. S. Hansson, 2004. Function of the heater: the dead horse arum revisited. Proceedings of the Royal Society London B 271: S13-S15. Doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2003.0111
Stensmyr, M.C., I. Urru, I. Collu. M. Celander. B.S. Hansson & A-M. Angioy, 2002. Rotting smell of dead-horse arum florets. Nature 420: 625-626. Doi: 10.1038/420625a

Nutritious two-component glue

22 March 2018 / wvanstrien

Queen larva is firmly attached to her ceiling

A bee larva that is to become a queen receives large quantities of royal jelly. And that is not only because the stuff is nutritious, as Anja Buttstedt and colleagues show.

A female honeybee larva can become a worker or a queen, her fate depending on the food she receives. During the first days, all larvae are treated to the so-called royal jelly, a nutritious mixture that the nurse bees produce in their head glands; it is rich in proteins, sugars and fats. After the third day, larvae that will grow up to be worker bees are raised on a different diet. When they pupate, nurse bees close their cells with a layer of wax. But a larva that is destined to become a queen is fed on royal jelly exclusively; the nurse bees bring it to her in generous quantities. Thanks to that nutritious diet, she grows bigger than worker bees.

Queen cup

The royal jelly has still another function, Anja Buttstedt and colleagues discovered: it holds the queen larva in place.

And that is badly needed. The cells in the comb, in which worker larvae grow up, are too small for a developing queen larva. For her, the bee workers will build a special cell, a so-called queen cell or queen cup. It is not only wider, but also differently oriented: vertically, opening downwards. Therefore, her royal highness could easily fall out of her cell.

Buttstedt shows why that does not happen: the royal jelly, which the workers deposit on the ceiling, is so sticky that it keeps the larva hanging from the ceiling until it pupates and the cell is sealed with wax. The stickiness arises because two proteins, royalactin (the main protein in royal jelly) and apisimin, form long fibrous structures that make the jelly viscous.

Fiber network

The workers produce and store the proteins in their hypopharyngeal glands. The gland mixture is liquid, enabling the bees to excrete it. But when they deposit it in a brood cell, they combine it with fatty acids which they produced in the mandibular glands, and in those acidic conditions, the proteins royalactin and apisimin form a fiber network.

So, royal jelly is a two-component adhesive, as the authors conclude, serving as excellent food as well. It is just what a queen larva needs to grow up safely.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Honeybee, comb and two queen cells. Piscisgate (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

Source:
Buttstedt, A., C.I. Muresxan,H. Lilie, G. Hause, C.H. Ihling, S-H. Schulze, M. Pietzsch & R.F.A. Moritz, 2018. How honeybees defy gravity with royal jelly to raise queens. Current Biology, online March 15. Doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.02.022

Helpers in the nest

16 March 2018 / wvanstrien

Thanks to helpers, cichlid mothers acquire more food

When young of the cichlid species Neolamprologus obscurus have grown up, they are allowed to remain in the territory of their mother for a while because of their help. Hirokazu Tanaka and colleagues wanted to know why that help is important.

Neolamprologus obscurus, a cichlid fish that occurs in Lake Tanganyika in Africa, lives in groups in which each breeding female owns a territory along a steep bank, where she has dug out several cavities under stones. In those safe shelters, she spends almost all her time and she uses them for breeding. She guards her eggs and fry, and chases conspecifics out of her territory.

But her grown up young are allowed to stay. They help her defend the territory and maintain the shelters by removing sand that continuously enters from the edges.

Tiny prey

The removal of sand from the shelters is most beneficial to her, Hirokazu Tanaka and colleagues discovered. The shelters not only serve as a safe residence and as a breeding ground, but they are also a means to acquire food. The fish feed on small benthic invertebrates, especially shrimp. These tiny animals move up to the water surface at night to forage, but in the full light of the day they are not safe there and before dawn, they sink back to the bottom to hide in cracks and cavities – such as cavities in which Neolamprologus obscurus lives. The food comes to the fish by itself.

Tanaka shows that the larger a cavity is, the more benthic invertebrates immigrate at dawn. Because of this increased food abundance, it is desirable for a breeding female to have helpers that maintain the shelters and even enlarge them.

Content

Of course, helpers take some of the food that they acquire, so part of the gain is lost for the breeding female. But she still profits, because the more helpers are present to remove sand from the edges of the cavity, the longer those edges can be. And the area and content increase even more: with a double number of diggers, maintaining a cavity with a circumference that is twice as large, the area and the volume become four times larger, and as a consequence, more food is available per fish when more helpers are around.

But there is a limit to the number of helpers a female will tolerate; it will be no more than ten. So, when young fish have become larger, they will disappear from her territory to start for themselves.

Willy van Strien

Sources:
Tanaka, H., J.G. Frommen & M. Kohda, 2018. Helpers increase food abundance in the territory of a cooperatively breeding fish. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 72: 51. Doi: 10.1007/s00265-018-2450-5
Tanaka, H., J.G. Frommen, L. Engqvist & M. Kohda, 2017. Task-dependent workload adjustment of female breeders in a cooperatively breeding fish. Behavioral Ecology 29: 221–229. Doi: 10.1093/beheco/arx149
Tanaka, H., D. Heg, H. Takeshima, T. Takeyama, S. Awata, M. Nishida & M. Kohda, 2015. Group composition, relatedness, and dispersal in the cooperatively breeding cichlid Neolamprologus obscurus. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 69: 169–181. Doi: 10.1007/s00265-014-1830-8

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