Biology subjects

Ludington, S. C.

Publications and source records attributed to Ludington, S. C..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Activity of FoxP2-positive neurons correlates with begging behavior in a social tadpole

Motor function is a critical aspect of social behavior in a wide range of taxa. The transcription factor FoxP2 is well studied in the context of vocal communication in humans, mice, and songbirds, but its role in regulating social behavior in other vertebrate taxa is unclear. We examined the distribution and activity of FoxP2-positive neurons in tadpoles of the mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator). In this species, tadpoles are reared in isolated plant nurseries and are aggressive to other tadpoles. Mothers provide unfertilized egg meals to tadpoles that perform a begging display by vigorously vibrating back and forth. We found that FoxP2 is widely distributed in the tadpole brain and parallels the brain distribution in mammals, birds, and fishes. We then tested the hypothesis that FoxP2-positive neurons would have differential activity levels in begging or aggression contexts compared to non-social controls. We found that FoxP2-positive neurons showed increased activation in the striatum and cerebellum during begging and in the nucleus accumbens during aggression. Overall, these findings lay a foundation for testing the hypothesis that FoxP2 has a generalizable role in social behavior beyond vocal communication across terrestrial vertebrates.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

Proopiomelanocortin (POMC) is a negative regulator of tadpole aggression through opioid receptor signaling

Aggression is a common behavioral response to limited environmental resources. Most research on the neural basis of aggression in vertebrates focuses on adult males, where sex steroid hormones and the ventromedial hypothalamus are important regulators of aggressive behavior. However, the young of many species also display aggression, although the neural basis of juvenile aggression is not well understood. Here we examine juvenile aggression in Mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) tadpoles, who live in small isolated pools with limited resources and display aggressive behaviors towards intruder tadpoles. We first conducted a longitudinal study of dyadic behavior and found aggressive behavior increases with tadpole age. We next evaluated which brain regions may be important for tadpole aggression by quantifying pS6-positive cells as a proxy for neural activity. We found more pS6-positive cells in the ventral hypothalamus of aggressive tadpoles compared to controls, similar to findings in adult mammals. We then quantified colocalization of pS6 with vasopressin and oxytocin cells and found no difference across behavior groups. Based on this information, we hypothesized that similar brain regions, but different neuromodulators, may promote aggression in juvenile tadpoles compared to the literature in adult animals. We then used an untargeted approach to molecularly profile pS6-positive neurons and found enrichment of the proopiomelanocortin (POMC) gene in aggressive tadpoles. As POMC is cleaved into several signaling peptides, we used pharmacology to target each pathway and discovered that blocking opioid receptors increases aggressive behavior. Together, this work suggests that POMC-derived B-endorphin is a negative regulator of juvenile aggression through the opioid receptor signaling. More broadly, this work suggests that similar brain regions, but different signaling molecules may be used to regulate aggression in adult and juvenile animals.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

Development of the visual system in social poison frog tadpoles

The ways in which animals sense the world changes throughout development. For example, young of many species have limited visual capabilities, but still make social decisions, likely based on information gathered through other sensory modalities. Poison frog tadpoles display complex social behaviors that have been suggested to rely on vision despite a century of research indicating tadpoles have poorly-developed visual systems relative to adults. Alternatively, other sensory modalities, such as the lateral line system, are functional at hatching in frogs and may guide social decisions while other sensory systems mature. Here, we examined development of the mechanosensory lateral line and visual systems in tadpoles of the mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) that use vibrational begging displays to stimulate egg feeding from their mothers. We found that tadpoles hatch with a fully developed lateral line system. While begging behavior increases with development, ablating the lateral line system inhibited begging in pre-metamorphic tadpoles, but not in metamorphic tadpoles. We also found that the increase in begging and decrease in reliance on the lateral line co-occurs with increased retinal neural activity and gene expression associated with eye development. Using the neural tracer neurobiotin, we found that axonal innervations from the eye to the brain proliferate during metamorphosis, with little retinotectal connections in recently-hatched tadpoles. We then tested visual function in a phototaxis assay and found tadpoles prefer darker environments. The strength of this preference increased with developmental stage, but eyes were not required for this behavior, possibly indicating a role for the pineal gland. Together, these data suggest that tadpoles rely on different sensory modalities for social interactions across development and that the development of sensory systems in socially complex poison frog tadpoles is similar to that of other frog species.

developmental biology↗