# Pumilio Tadpole Recognition



## ESweet (Apr 13, 2009)

For those of you interested, an article was just published in _Animal Behavior_ about how a mother recognizes her own young. Sort of neat. It's titled "Discrimination of offspring by indirect recognition in an egg-feeding dendrobatid frog, Oophaga pumilio" in _Animal Behavior_, November 2009 - If you have access to it =/

Erik


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## Philsuma (Jul 18, 2006)

Can you get a link or reprint on here??


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## wcsbackwards (Oct 4, 2008)

Here's the abstract:


ScienceDirect - Animal Behaviour : Discrimination of offspring by indirect recognition in an egg-feeding dendrobatid frog, Oophaga pumilio


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## BrianC (Jul 18, 2009)

ScienceDirect - Animal Behaviour : Discrimination of offspring by indirect recognition in an egg-feeding dendrobatid frog, Oophaga pumilio

That should link to the abstract if you're interested.

Interesting little field study at LaSelva research station in Costa Rica, where my lovely wife did some research : ). Essentially - in several field experiments with different combinations of leaving/moving/swapping tadpoles from sites where females deposited them, care received was determined by location and not relatedness. Females preferentially deposited eggs at the location where she deposited the tad, even if an unrelated tad had been placed there, and her actual offspring was in another location 2cm away.

Also, there was no statistical difference in provisioning when 10 day old tadpoles were replaced with other 10 day old tadpoles, or 1 day old tadpoles.

So the mothers probably don't recognize their offspring - only that there is a living tadpole in the place where she left a tadpole. Stynoski addressed the interesting implications that this could have on the evolution of 'reproductive parasitism'


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## Julio (Oct 8, 2007)

that is interesting, funny how in captivity they will feed any tad they come across though.


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