Max Ringler

Universität Bern | UniBe · Institute of Ecology and Evolution

An animal’s behavioral phenotype comprises several traits, which are hierarchically structured in functional units. This is manifested in measured behaviors often being correlated, partly reflecting the need of a coordinated functional response. Unfortunately, we still have limited understanding whether consistent differences in animal behaviors ar...

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...

Intra-specific aggressive interactions play a prominent role in the life of many animals. While studies have found evidence for repeatability in boldness, activity, and exploration in amphibians, we know relatively little about consistent among-individual variation in aggressiveness, despite its importance for male-male competition and territoriali...

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...

Understanding population dynamics is vital in amphibian conservation. To compare demography and movements, we conducted a capture-recapture study over three spring seasons in two populations of Salamandra salamandra in the Vienna Woods. The study sites differ in topography, vegetation, and the type of breeding waters. Population density in a beech...

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...

The trade-off between speed and accuracy affects many behavioural processes like predator avoidance, foraging and nest-site selection, but little is known about this trade-off relative to territorial behaviour. Some poison frogs are highly territorial and fiercely repel calling male intruders. However, attacks need to be conducted cautiously, as th...

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...

Social complexity arises from the formation of social relationships like social bonds and dominance hierarchies. In turn, these aspects may be affected by the degree of fission-fusion dynamics, i.e., changes in group size and composition over time. Whilst fission-fusion dynamics has been studied in mammals, birds have received comparably little att...

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...

Parental decisions in animals are often context‐dependent and shaped by fitness trade‐offs between parents and offspring. For example, the selection of breeding habitats can considerably impact the fitness of both offspring and parents, and therefore parents should carefully weigh the costs and benefits of available options for their current and fu...

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...

Acoustic ranging allows identifying the distance of a sound source and mediates inter-individual spacing and aggression in territorial species. Birds and mammals are known to use more complex cues than only sound pressure level (SPL), which can be influenced by the signaller and signal transmission in non-predictable ways and thus is not reliable b...

Systematic infanticide of unrelated young has been reported in several animal taxa. Particular attention has been given to carnivores and primates, where infanticide is a sexually selected strategy of males to gain increased access to female mating partners. Cannibals must ensure avoiding their own offspring and targeting only unrelated young. Ther...

Acoustic species recognition in anurans depends on spectral and temporal characteristics of the advertisement call. the recognition space of a species is shaped by the likelihood of heterospecific acoustic interference. the dendrobatid frogs Allobates talamancae (cOpe, 1875) and Silverstoneia flotator (dunn, 1931) occur syntopi-cally in southwest c...

Video S1: Crows' responses to the tonic immobility test.

Figure S1: Sketch of the zoo of Vienna (‘Tiergarten Schönbrunn’). Figure S2: Division of the zoo into an evenly spaced hexagonal grid (grid sites) used to assess space use of crows. Figure S3: Maps generated in QGIS, to identify the number of foraging sites (a) and grid sites (b) individual crows were sighted in, respectively. Table S1: Frequenc...

While personality-dependent dispersal is well studied, local space use has received surprisingly little attention in this context, despite the multiple consequences on survival and fitness. Regarding the coping style of individuals , recent studies on personality-dependent space use within a habitat indicate that 'proactive' individuals are wider r...

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...

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...

Reproductive skew, the uneven distribution of reproductive success among individuals, is a common feature of many animal populations. Several scenarios have been proposed to favour either high or low levels of reproductive skew. Particularly a male-biased operational sex ratio and the asynchronous arrival of females is expected to cause high variat...

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...

Spreading reproduction across time or space can optimize fitness by minimizing the risks for offspring survival in varying and unpredictable environments. Poison frogs (Dendrobatidae) are characterized by complex spatial and reproductive behaviour, such as territoriality, prolonged courtship and parental care. The partitioning of larvae from terres...

“Ecosystem engineering” describes habitat alteration by an organism that affects another organism; such nontrophic interactions between organisms are a current focus in ecological research. Our study quantifies the actual impact an ecosystem engineer can have on another species by using a previously identified model system—peccaries and rainforest...

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...

Reliably marking larvae and re-identifying them after metamorphosis is a challenge that has hampered studies on recruitment, dispersal, migration, and survivorship of amphibians for a long time, since conventional tags are not reliably retained through metamorphosis. Molecular methods allow unique genetic fingerprints to be established for individu...

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...

Here we document the development of thirteen novel microsatellite markers for the reticulated glass frog Hyalinobatrachium valerioi (Centrolenidae). Nine of those markers were polymorphic and contained between 4 and 34 alleles per locus (mean = 20.3) in 138 individuals (91 males, 47 females) from the field site 'La Gamba', Costa Rica. Average obser...

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...

In anurans, vocalization is the most prominent form of communication. Unique acoustic properties are used to enable species discrimination and to avoid mismating. Syntopic, vocally co-active frog species differentiate each other acoustically by using advertisement calls with different temporal and spectral properties. In territorial frogs, playback...

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...

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...

The adaptive significance of sequential polyandry is a challenging question in evolutionary and behavioral biology. Costs and benefits of different mating patterns are shaped by the spatial distribution of individuals and by genetic parameters such as the pairwise relatedness between potential mating partners. Thus, females should become less choos...

While field and laboratory based studies have provided significant insights into the parental care and courtship behaviour of dendrobatoid frogs, a comprehensive assessment of their genetic mating systems and population genetic parameters has been precluded because of the lack of highly variable DNA markers. Here we document the development of nine...

Average values of the different area estimators for point of the central area. A) ellipse, B) star, C) triangle, D) angle, E) circle, F) irregular