ASSESSING BEHAVIORAL RESPONSES TO ECOLOGICALLY RELEVANT PREY CHEMICAL STIMULI




Helena Lewis, Eckerd College, Marine Science Discipline

Maya McElfish, University of Santa Cruz California, Ecology and Evolution Department 

Rita Mehta, University of Santa Cruz California, Ecology and Evolution Department

Baited Remote Underwater Videos (BRUVs) are often used to document species abundance and diversity, offering a more robust technique for surveying cryptic species than more traditional survey methods. However, BRUVS are often deployed using environmentally unrealistic bait quantities to draw in the maximum diversity and as such, these deployments do not give us a clear understanding of the behavioral responses to the odor cues of ecologically realistic prey quantities. Similarly, BRUVs have not been used to assess species-specific responses to chemical signatures from different prey items. The goal of this research was to further our understanding of chemoreception in the marine environment. We deployed BRUVs across multiple habitats, using two prey species at ecologically relevant concentrations. This allowed us to 1) better understand which predatory species may use olfactory cues during foraging and 2) assess differences in olfactory-sensitive predator guilds between rocky reef and sandy bottom habitats. Our results indicate that the kelp bass is highly capable of chemoreception when compared to many other predatory fishes observed in this study, and that kelp bass and the California moray may behaviorally respond to olfactory stimuli from prey items to facilitate foraging in a similar capacity.




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