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The power of the seasons: rainfall triggers parental care in poison frogs

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Abstract

The quality of breeding sites is of great importance for the reproductive success and accordingly the fitness of many animal species. Hence, individuals should decide carefully where to rear their offspring. Often parents have to account for multiple characteristics of habitat quality at once, which in turn might change over time. Specimens confronted with such variability may evolve the ability to display context-dependant decision plasticity. Anuran amphibians breeding in ephemeral pools largely face two risks for their offspring: desiccation and predation. The Neotropical poison frog Ranitomeya variabilis deposits both eggs and tadpoles in phytotelmata. These small tadpole nurseries lower the risk of offspring predation. However, because most poison frog tadpoles are cannibalistic, even these pools need to be surveyed for predators, and parents tend to avoid deposition with conspecifics. We tested if this avoidance behaviour does change in parental R. variabilis depending on seasonal circumstances. Over several months we provided the frogs the option to deposit their eggs or tadpoles in pools that did and did not contain chemical cues of cannibalistic conspecifics, respectively. During the rainy season, frogs strongly avoided conspecific cues for both eggs and tadpoles. Anyway, with the change to the dry season, parental preferences changed such that parent frogs were more likely to deposit tadpoles (but not eggs) in pools containing cues of conspecific tadpoles. We suggest that R. variabilis, a species that typically isolates its cannibalistic offspring, has evolved a plastic feeding behaviour with regard to the risk of phytotelmata desiccation. We interpret that parents provide older tadpoles with younger ‘trophic’ tadpoles in order to accelerate their development and save them from impending desiccation.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Rebecca Killick and Ortwin Elle for help with the statistics and Michael Mayer, Elena Rudolf, Rainer Schulte and Evan Twomey for support in the field. Asociación de Productores de Ranas Venenosas, Progreso (ASPRAVEP), kindly allowed us to use their field station. Research permits were issued by the Ministry of Agriculture (DGFFS) in Lima (0200-2011-AG-DGFFS-DGFFS). This study was funded by the ‘Forschungsfonds’ of Trier University (to S. L.), the ‘Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes’ (to L. M. S.) and the ‘Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft’, DFG (to S. L., M. Veith and W. Brack; LO 1681/1-1). We are most grateful to authorities, funders and collaborators.

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  1. Department of Biogeography, Trier University, 54286, Trier, Germany

    Lisa M. Schulte & Stefan Lötters

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  1. Lisa M. Schulte
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Correspondence to Lisa M. Schulte.

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Schulte, L.M., Lötters, S. The power of the seasons: rainfall triggers parental care in poison frogs. Evol Ecol 27, 711–723 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10682-013-9637-z

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