Levesque, Alexander (2025) Depletion of Disturbance Cues in Convict Cichlids (Amatitlania nigrofasciata). Masters thesis, Concordia University.
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Abstract
Within aquatic ecosystems, disturbance cues provide a critical source of chemosensory predation risk information. Unlike the well-documented damage-released chemical alarm cues, disturbance cues do not require direct physical interactions with predators to facilitate their release. Rather, disturbance cues are hypothesized to be nitrogenous wastes produced as the result of protein metabolism. Due to their release mechanism and chemical makeup, disturbance cues can be considered a generalized cue, lacking species specificity. Experiment 1 tested the generalized metabolic byproduct hypothesis, comparing the response of convict cichlids (Amatitlania nigrofasciata) conditioned to high or low background risk to the disturbance cues from similarly sized or large conspecific donors, controlling for donor biomass. We predicted that as disturbance cue is a metabolic byproduct, we may see a weaker response to larger individuals as they tend to excrete less nitrogen per unit mass. Our results, however, found no effect of donor size on receiver response. In experiments 2 and 3, we tested whether stores of disturbance cue, as a metabolic byproduct, could be depleted through repeated predator exposure at 30- (experiment 2) or 5- (experiment 3) minute intervals. We predicted that if depletion was occurring, disturbance cues collected later would elicit a weaker response from receivers, and that if replenishment was occurring, we would see a more dramatic decrease in response in the shorter time interval. Consistent with our hypothesis, our results showed no evidence of depletion at 30-minute increments, but at 5-minute increments, depletion was reached at the fifth collected disturbance cues. Ultimately, the body size experiment showed a generalized response to disturbance cues from different sized donors, and the depletion experiment supported the metabolic byproduct hypothesis.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Biology |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
| Authors: | Levesque, Alexander |
| Institution: | Concordia University |
| Degree Name: | M. Sc. |
| Program: | Biology |
| Date: | 8 September 2025 |
| Thesis Supervisor(s): | Brown, Grant E. |
| Keywords: | Research creation |
| ID Code: | 996380 |
| Deposited By: | Alexander Levesque |
| Deposited On: | 29 Jun 2026 15:07 |
| Last Modified: | 29 Jun 2026 15:07 |
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