2024/12/13 by Condrell, Andrew, Lee, Cory, Vorkapich, Aldo
#Muricidae #Tegula #intertidal gastropods #threat-sensitive predator avoidance
paper · doi:10.21973/n3xt1b
Predators drive prey to divert energy from foraging and reproduction to predator avoidance behaviors incentivizing efficient and precise threat discernment to balance these tradeoffs. The abundant herbivorous snail Tegula funebralis (black turban snail) shares intertidal habitat with numerous predatory gastropods that may pose varied levels of predation risk. To test potential discernment, we compared the evasive response of T. funebralis to three predatory snails of the Muricidae family in an experimental setting. To assess the frequency of muricid snail predation on T. funebralis (informing relative predation threat for each species), we tallied observed instances in situ. Experimentally, we found that T. funebralis exhibited a greater evasive response to Acanthinucella punctulata (spotted unicorn), aligning with a high observed frequency of predation in situ. However, T. funebralis did not show a differential evasive response between the infrequent predator Paciocinebrina circumtexta (circled rocksnail) and non-predators, namely Nucella emarginata (emarginate dogwinkle) and conspecifics. We conclude that T. funebralis discerns between muricid predators corresponding with relative predation risk. Thus, the primary predators of T. funebralis may be most influential on intertidal community composition by exerting the greatest impact on T. funebralis behavior and abundance with downstream implications for herbivory regime.