Pleiotropic antipredator strategies, fleeing and feigning death, correlated with dopamine levels in Tribolium castaneum
Section snippets
Insects and Culture
The Tribolium castaneum beetle culture used in this study has been maintained in laboratories for more than 25 years. The beetles were fed wholemeal (Yoshikura Shokai, Tokyo, Japan) enriched with brewer's yeast (Asahi Beer, Toyko, Japan) as the rearing medium and kept in a chamber (Sanyo, Tokyo, Japan) maintained at 25°C and 60% RH under a photoperiod of 16:8 h light:dark cycle (lights on at 0700, light off at 2300).
Observation of Death-feigning
One day before observation, each beetle was placed in a well of a 48-well tissue
Responses to Selection
The duration of death-feigning showed a clear direct response to selection and a steady divergence between the two selection regimes in both selection replications (Fig. 1). After 16 generations of selection, S strain beetles feigned death for 0.1 s, while L strain beetles showed more than 2 min of death-feigning on average.
The frequency of death-feigning behaviour also showed a clear correlated response to selection for the duration of death-feigning (Fig. 2). After 10 generations, almost all L
Discussion
A genetic correlation was found between death-feigning behaviour and the level of running with locomotor activity, which is associated with fleeing in T. castaneum. Beetles derived from strains having less and more death-feigning had longer and shorter travelling distances, respectively. Predator avoidance rates may depend on a prey's travel speed when the prey escapes by fleeing. On the other hand, death-feigning behaviour is adaptive to survival when T. castaneum adults encounter a model
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Dr Mike Speed and two anonymous referees for valuable comments on the manuscript and Yukari Takeda, Atsushi Sugita and Yusuke Nishi for insect rearing, and Dr Akira Matsumoto and Prof. Masaki Sakai for useful advice on neuroactive substances. This work was supported by KAKENHI 19370011 and 19657026, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, JSPS and MEXT to T.M.
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2022, Progress in Brain ResearchCitation Excerpt :There is evidence, in insects, that individuals that are active at the time of threat often adopt a fleeing strategy, while inactive individuals more frequently resort to a TI strategy. In T. castaneum, the strain selected for long TI duration had lower levels of locomotor activity (walking distance measured for 15 min by an image tracking system) than in the short duration strain, proving a negative genetic correlation between the intensity of TI and activity levels (Miyatake et al., 2008). The same was found in Tribolium confusum (Nakayama et al., 2010).
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- 1
K. Tabuchi is now at the Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, New Brunswick E3B 6C2, Canada.
- 2
K. Sasaki is at the Department of Brain and Bioinformation Science, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Hakusan, Ishikawa, 924-0838, Japan.
- 3
S. Moriya is at National Agricultural Research Center, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8666, Japan.