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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Christina Halpin, Dr John Skelhorn, Professor Candy Rowe
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Aposematic prey use conspicuous warning signals to advertise their toxicity to predators (see Fig. 1a) [1]. Naïve predators readily learn to associate this warning coloration with toxicity and reduce their attacks on aposematic prey [2]. However, predators do not exclude these prey from their diets and frequently eat aposematic prey that they know to contain toxins [3, 4]. These ‘educated’ predators are thought to be trading-off the benefits of obtaining nutrients from prey with the costs of ingesting toxins. Despite the idea of nutrient-toxin trade-offs having been around for more than 100 years [5], there is still no evidence that the nutritional content of aposematic prey affects predators’ decisions to eat them. Furthermore theoretical approaches to understanding the evolution of aposematism and mimicry (where two species share the same warning coloration; see Fig. 1a) almost invariably fail to consider how the mortality of defended prey is influenced by their nutritional value. Here we show that the number of toxic prey items that predators are prepared to eat increases with the protein content of prey: this has significant wide-ranging implications for the study of prey defences.
Author(s): Halpin CG, Skelhorn J, Rowe C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Year: 2014
Volume: 281
Issue: 1781
Print publication date: 05/03/2014
Acceptance date: 06/02/2014
Date deposited: 24/03/2014
ISSN (print): 0962-8452
ISSN (electronic): 1471-2954
Publisher: The Royal Society
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.3255
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.3255
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