The ecology of habituation in fiddler crabs

• Applicant: Dr. Tobias Merkle
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
• Term: from 2008 to 2010
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 71656862

Habituation is a widespread form of behavioural plasticity in animals describing a decrease in responsiveness to events that are frequently encountered. It is increasingly being recognized that habituation is context- and stimulus-dependent and thus may involve some form of associative learning. Little is known, however, about the rules of habituation that make it adaptive under natural, evolution-relevant conditions. In this project I will make use of the unique opportunities offered by the analytically transparent lifestyle of tropical fiddler crabs, to investigate the event-specificity, the contextdependence and the associative processes involved in the habituation of responses to predators in the natural social and ecological setting of the animals. Because the behaviour of large groups of identified crabs can be monitored over long periods of time in great spatial and temporal detail together with what they see, it will be possible to identify the spatio-temporal structure of events and the visual information available to the crabs during these events. These experiments will allow me to determine the dynamics and the adaptiveness of this particular form of behavioural plasticity in the context of predation under natural conditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Australia
• Host: Dr. Jochen Zeil