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Male pumilio carrying tads.

5K views 27 replies 12 participants last post by  Mantellaprince20 
MPepper said:
Anyone else seen this? Yesterday I had a male and female pumilio pair each carrying a tadpole. I have a pic showing both of them with tads, and a horriibly blury pic of male calling with tad. unfortunately its busy times and i wasn't able to watch them all day to see where or if the male deposited his, so wont be able to say for sure if his tad is raised. Just curious if anyone else has seen this? i thought i saw this once before with a pr of bastimentos, but that was a few years ago, and i have not seen it since.

Ill try to get some pics up before too long.

Mark
Mark, I thought this was some kind of crackpot post until I saw it was you sending it. This is wild stuff. I've never seen males carrying tads but I have witnessed that the male tends to wet the eggs until they get close to hatching and then the female takes over. Now I'm wondering if the female always does take over. The big question is how the heck does the female find tads to feed that have been deposited by males? It pretty much rules out a mental map. Possibly chemical cues but then the male would have to leave a different trail when transporting tads than when just bopping around wookin' pa nub. It certainly raises questions about how this system works.
 
rmelancon said:
The frantic swimming and twitching absolutely signals the female to deposit eggs. You see this in histo and pumilio tads and I would guess in other egg feeders. They do this when they are being reared "artificially" as well as when the female is doing the feeding. With tads being raised in cups as opposed to broms its a lot easier to see whats going on.

As far as how the female knows where male deposited tads are, the male will lead the female to the tad. He does this through a series of actions similar to mating, much in the same way he leads the female to a suitable egg laying site.
Yes, the tail thrashing has been mentioned in the literature and is almost certainly the cue that gets the female to deposit the eggs.

It's an interesting idea to think that the female may be led to tads by the male similar to how the facultative egg feeders do it through calling and mating ritual. However, yet another question arises from this. Are there duel mechanisms at work? We know that females deposit tads so they could develop their own mental map to find those deposition sites again. But if the male deposits tads, it requires a different mechanism. There is not a single mechanism that would draw females to both types of deposition sites since the male doesn't know where the female left tadpoles and vice versa. So are there two different mechanisms being used here? If so, do they both provide equal success rates? And why are there two mechanisms, why would it increase the overall reproductive success beyond just having one parent depositing all of the tads and one mechanism for leading the female back for egg deposition?

Is it any wonder why these are so many people's favorite frogs?
 
Mark,

My experience with blue jeans is the same as yours, no tad carrying or involvement by the male. But I should preface that with the fact that most froglets just "magically" appear with no observations of egg or tadpole care on my part so I can't really say what normally happens.

Something that comes to mind regarding the monogamy/polygamy issue is that perhaps the system is sloppy. Let's set kinship selection aside for the moment and just assume the tends to drive tad and egg deposition by enticing females to a site through calling and other behaviors and that this is what allows a female to discover tadpole she did not deposit. So the male is the one with the map. But lets also suppose they are hard wired for some very simple stimulus/response. A male sees a female and starts calling and enticing her to his chosen location. A female hears the calling and sexy dancing and follows her instincts. Maybe it doesn't matter whether the pair has ever met or not. The male is simply following an urge to entice a female and the female follows the urge to first follow a male and then to deposit an egg where she sees a thrashing tadpole. This type of sloppy system means the female may be feeding some other girl's tads which is why I say we need to set kinship selection aside for now. Although kinship selection is certainly not universally applied in nature, especially as brain capacity decreases. I have no problem thinking that kinship selection is not a strong player in these behaviors.

As for why different morphs or populations of pumilio may be playing this game on slightly different rules, that's a real puzzler. Perhaps it has something to do with differences in habitat but is worth mulling over. I have to run now but I hope this discussion continues.
 
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