Quantity discrimination in parental fish: female convict cichlid discriminate fry shoals of different sizes

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• 作者：Mohammad Navid Forsatkar ; Mohammad Ali Nematollahi ; Angelo Bisazza
• 刊名：Animal Cognition
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：September 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：19
• 期：5
• 页码：959-964
• 全文大小：591 KB
• 刊物类别：Biomedical and Life Sciences
• 刊物主题：Life Sciences
  Behavioural Sciences
  Zoology
  Human Physiology
  
• 出版者：Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
• ISSN：1435-9456
• 卷排序：19

文摘

Numerical abilities have been found to be adaptive in different contexts, including mating, foraging, fighting assessment and antipredator strategies. In species with parental care, another potential advantage is the possibility to adjust parental behavior in relation to the numerosity of the progeny. The finding that many fish vary their parental investment in relation to brood size advocates the existence of a mechanism for appraising offspring number, an aspect that has never been directly investigated. Here we tested the ability of parental female convict cichlid (Amatitlania nigrofasciata) to discriminate between two fry groups differing in number by measuring time spent attempting to recover groups of fry experimentally displaced from the next. Females spent more time trying to recover the fry from larger groups when tested with contrasts 6 versus 12 (1:2) and 6 versus 9 fry (2:3); however, they showed no preference in the 6 versus 8 (3:4) contrast, suggesting that this task exceeds their discrimination capacity.KeywordsNumerical ratiosQuantity discriminationNumerical abilityParental careCichlid fish