Andrius PasukonisStanford University | SU · Department of Biology
Andrius Pasukonis
PhD
About
58
Publications
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700
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2011 - September 2015
Publications
Publications (58)
Among vertebrates, comparable spatial learning abilities have been found in birds, mammals, turtles and fishes, but virtually nothing is known about such abilities in amphibians. Overall, amphibians are the most sedentary vertebrates, but poison frogs (Dendrobatidae) routinely shuttle tadpoles from terrestrial territories to dispersed aquatic depos...
The ability to associate environmental cues with valuable resources strongly increases the chances of finding them again, and thus memory often guides animal movement. For example, many temperate region amphibians show strong breeding site fidelity and will return to the same areas even after the ponds have been destroyed. In contrast, many tropica...
A core feature of social intelligence is the understanding of third-party relations, which has been experimentally demonstrated in primates. Whether other social animals also have this capacity, and whether they can use this capacity flexibly to, for example, also assess the relations of neighbouring conspecifics, remains unknown. Here we show that...
Dendrobatidae (dart-poison frogs) exhibit some of the most complex spa-tial behaviors among amphibians, such as territoriality and tadpole trans-port from terrestrial clutches to widely distributed deposition sites. In species that exhibit long-term territoriality, high homing performance after tadpole transport can be assumed, but experimental evi...
Parental care systems are shaped by costs and benefits to each sex of investing into current versus future progeny. Flexible compensatory parental care is mainly known in biparental species, particularly where parental desertion or reduction of care by 1 parent is common. The other parent can then compensate this loss by either switching parental r...
Sex differences in vertebrate spatial abilities are typically interpreted under the adaptive specialization hypothesis, which posits that male reproductive success is linked to larger home ranges and better navigational skills. The androgen spillover hypothesis counters that enhanced male spatial performance may be a byproduct of higher androgen le...
Many animals exhibit complex navigation over different scales and environments. Navigation studies in amphibians have largely focused on species with life histories that require accurate spatial movements, such as territorial poison frogs and migratory pond-breeding amphibians that show fidelity to mating sites. However, other amphibian species hav...
For animals to survive until reproduction, it is crucial that juveniles successfully detect potential predators and respond with appropriate behavior. The recognition of cues originating from predators can be innate or learned. Cues of various modalities might be used alone or in multi-modal combinations to detect and distinguish predators but stud...
Breeding sites are often a limited and ephemeral resource for rainforest frogs. This resource limitation has driven the evolution of diverse reproductive strategies that increase offspring survival. For example, poison frogs shuttle their tadpoles from terrestrial clutches to aquatic rearing sites, using various cues to assess pool suitability. Yet...
Many animals exhibit complex navigation over different scales and environments. Navigation studies in amphibians have largely focused on species with life histories that require advanced spatial capacities, such as territorial poison frogs and migratory pond-breeding amphibians that show fidelity to mating sites. However, other species have remaine...
Many species of Neotropical frogs have evolved to deposit their tadpoles in small water bodies inside plant structures called phytotelmata. These pools are small enough to exclude large predators but have limited nutrients and high desiccation risk. Here, we explore phytotelm use by three common Neotropical species: Osteocephalus oophagus, an arbor...
Many species of Neotropical frogs have evolved to deposit their tadpoles in small water bodies inside plant structures called phytotelmata. These pools are small enough to exclude large predators but have limited nutrients and high desiccation risk. Here, we explore phytotelm use by three common Neotropical species: Osteocephalus oophagus, an arbor...
en In tropical regions, some anuran species breed "explosively", reproducing in massive and highly diverse aggregations during a brief window of time. These aggregations can serve as acoustic beacons, attracting other anurans toward seasonal ponds. We hypothesize that conspecific and heterospecific calls play a role in navigation toward ponds and s...
Most male frogs produce calls to attract females and repel rivals. The transmission of these calls can be affected by many acoustic and environmental characteristics, which can influence the detection and decoding of the signal by the receiver. Calling-perch height has a strong influence on sound propagation and acoustic spacing with neighboring ma...
Longer-range movements of anuran amphibians such as mass migrations and habitat invasion have received a lot of attention, but fine-scale spatial behavior remains largely understudied. This gap is especially striking for species that show long-term site fidelity and display their whole behavioral repertoire in a small area. Studying fine-scale move...
Prolonged and complex courtship behaviors, involving tactile, acoustic, and visual signals, are common in Neotropical poison frogs (Dendrobatidae). Courtship is an important precursor to mating, but courtship components vary across species. In Brilliant-Thighed Poison Frogs (Allobates femoralis [Boulenger 1883]), males guide females to oviposition...
Descriptive studies of natural history have always been a source of knowledge on which experimental work and scientific progress rely. Poison frogs are a well-studied group of small Neotropical frogs with diverse parental behaviors, distinct calls, and bright colors that warn predators about their toxicity; and a showcase of advances in fundamental...
Parents can influence offspring dispersal through breeding site selection, competition, or by directly moving their offspring during parental care. Many animals move their young, but the potential role of this behavior in dispersal has rarely been investigated. Neotropical poison frogs (Dendrobatidae) are well known for shuttling their tadpoles fro...
Descriptive studies of natural history have always been a source of knowledge on which experimental work and scientific progress rely. Poison frogs are a well-studied group of small Neotropical frogs with diverse parental behaviors, distinct calls, and bright colors that warn predators about their toxicity; and a showcase of advances in fundamental...
Some territorial animals recognize familiar neighbours and are less aggressive to established neighbours than they are to strangers. This form of social recognition produces a ‘dear enemy’ effect, which may allow animals to reduce the costs of territory defence. The dear enemy effect is thought to reflect either the decreased threat posed by neighb...
These authors contributed equally to this work Summary statement Three-striped poison frogs (Ameerega trivittata) can navigate home via a direct path from areas exceeding the range of their routine movements. Abstract Most animals move in dense habitats where distant landmarks are limited, but how they find their way around remains poorly understoo...
Understanding the external stimuli and natural contexts that elicit complex behaviors, such as parental care, is key in linking behavioral mechanisms to their real-life function. Poison frogs provide obligate parental care by shuttling their tadpoles from terrestrial clutches to aquatic nurseries, but little is known about the proximate mechanisms...
Animals relying on uncertain, ephemeral and patchy resources have to regularly update their information about profitable sites. For many tropical amphibians, widespread, scattered breeding pools constitute such fluctuating resources. Among tropical amphibians, poison frogs (Dendrobatidae) exhibit some of the most complex spatial and parental behavi...
Movement speed during tadpole transport
Histogram showing the range of movement speed during tadpole transport from one tracking location to the next one (m/h).
Tagged male tadpole carrier
The tag consists of a silicon tube around the waist, with an additional silicone strap between the hind legs, a small diode (beneath the white sealing) and a dipole antenna made of flexible coated wire.
Movement precision during tadpole transport
Summarized data of the average angular deviation, average distance from the straight-line path and SC for the tadpole transport of frogs which encountered only available pools during tadpole transport (A) and frogs which encountered non-available pools (N), minimum, maximum, 1st and 3rd quartile, median a...
Movement precision during homing
Summarized data of the average angular deviation, average distance from the straight-line path and SC for the homing trajectories of frogs which encountered only available pools during tadpole transport (A) and frogs which encountered non-available pools (N), minimum, maximum, 1st and 3rd quartile, median and mean.
Homing trajectories
Trajectory map showing movement patterns of frogs homing back to their territory after tadpole transport. Red asterisks represent the territory centers of tracked carriers and colored lines show different tracking events. Squares represent the cross-array of thirteen artificial tadpole deposition sites, blue squares representing...
Summarized results of homing trajectories
Each row represents a specific tracking event. Columns show the tracked distance during homing, straight line distance (from the last deposition site to the territory center), duration of homing, whether homing took more than one day (overnight = 1), average speed and the straightness coefficient.
Raw data
Spatial coordinates of tracked frogs.
Movement speed during homing
Histogram showing the range of movement speed during homing from one tracking location to the next one (m/h).
Model results—Influence of weather on movement speed
File contains Table S1 on model selection, Table S2 showing all model-averaged coefficients and the discussion of the model results.
Summarized results of tadpole transport trajectories
Each row represents a specific tracking event. Columns show the frog ID, number of tadpoles, tracked distance, total time of the tracked path (h), average speed (m/h) across the entire TTs, number of deposition sites visited (in parentheses the number of available (a) and non-available (n) deposi...
Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocalizations. Studies suggest that acoustic attributes of aroused vocalizations are shared across many mammalian speci...
The ability to differentiate between one's own and foreign offspring ensures the exclusive allocation of costly parental care to only related progeny. The selective pressure to evolve offspring discrimination strategies is largely shaped by the likelihood and costs of offspring confusion. We hypothesize that males and females with different reprodu...
Detour behaviour, an individual's ability to reach its goal by taking an indirect route, has been used to test spatial cognitive abilities across a variety of taxa. Although many amphibians show a strong homing ability, there is currently little evidence of amphibian spatial cognitive flexibility. We tested whether a territorial frog, Allobates fem...
For animals with spatially complex behaviours at relatively small scales, the resolution of a global positioning system (GPS) receiver location is often below the resolution needed to correctly map animals’ spatial behaviour. Natural conditions such as canopy cover, canyons or clouds can further degrade GPS receiver reception. Here we present a det...
A core feature of social intelligence is the understanding of third-party relations, which has been experimentally demonstrated in primates. Whether other social animals also have this capacity, and whether they can use this capacity flexibly to, for example, also assess the relations of neighbouring conspecifics, remains unknown. Here we show that...
Introduction
The ability to relocate home or breeding sites after experimental removal has been observed in several amphibians and the sensory basis of this behavior has been studied in some temperate-region species. However, the actual return trajectories have rarely been quantified in these studies and it remains unknown how different cues guide...
Individuals should aim to adjust their parental behaviours in order to maximize the success of their offspring but minimize associated costs. Plasticity in parental care is well documented from various bird, mammal and fish species, whereas amphibians were traditionally assumed as being highly instinct-bound. Therefore, little is known about 'highe...
Here we document the development of seven novel
polymorphic microsatellite markers for the brilliantthighed
poison frog Allobates femoralis (Dendrobatidae).
We found between six and 27 alleles per locus in 100
individuals (50 males, 50 females) from the field site
‘Saut Pararé’, French Guiana, with an average observed
heterozygosity of 0.79. One lo...
Questions
Question (1)
As part of our project on spatial behavior in tropical frogs, we are trying to relate rainforest understory openness/visibility with homing orientation accuracy. We are using a photographic "cover board" method adapted from vegetation density literature to quantify the visibility (i.e., the percentage of the reference board covered by vegetation at a given distance). However, I'm having hard time finding any references using this (or similar) approaches for studying animal navigation. Has anyone tried something similar or knows of good references? Are there good reasons why this method doesn't seem to be often used for studying animal orientation? Or do I simply have my keywords wrong?... I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!
Projects
Project (1)
We investigate how the combination of environmental factors, reproductive strategies, and navigational abilities result in similarities and differences of tropical frog spatial behavior. Going beyond descriptive science, we attempt to link individual movements to cognitive abilities and environmental factors through experimental manipulations and individual tracking in the field.
