Appraisal of unimodal cues during agonistic interactions in .
Laura Chabrolles, Imen Ben Ammar, Marie S A Fernandez, Nicolas Boyer, Joël Attia, Paulo J Fonseca, M Clara P Amorim, Marilyn Beauchaud
Author Information
Laura Chabrolles: Equipe Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle, ENES/Neuro-PSI CNRS UMR 9197, Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France.
Imen Ben Ammar: Equipe Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle, ENES/Neuro-PSI CNRS UMR 9197, Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France.
Marie S A Fernandez: Equipe Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle, ENES/Neuro-PSI CNRS UMR 9197, Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France.
Nicolas Boyer: Equipe Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle, ENES/Neuro-PSI CNRS UMR 9197, Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France.
Joël Attia: Equipe Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle, ENES/Neuro-PSI CNRS UMR 9197, Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France.
Paulo J Fonseca: Departamento de Biologia Animal and cE3c-Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
M Clara P Amorim: MARE-Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre, ISPA, Instituto Universitário, Lisbon, Portugal.
Marilyn Beauchaud: Equipe Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle, ENES/Neuro-PSI CNRS UMR 9197, Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France.
Communication is essential during social interactions including animal conflicts and it is often a complex process involving multiple sensory channels or modalities. To better understand how different modalities interact during communication, it is fundamental to study the behavioural responses to both the composite multimodal signal and each unimodal component with adequate experimental protocols. Here we test how an African cichlid, which communicates with multiple senses, responds to different sensory stimuli in a social relevant scenario. We tested males with isolated chemical (urine or holding water coming both from dominant males), visual (real opponent or video playback) and acoustic (agonistic sounds) cues during agonistic interactions. We showed that (1) these fish relied mostly on the visual modality, showing increased aggressiveness in response to the sight of a real contestant but no responses to urine or agonistic sounds presented separately, (2) video playback in our study did not appear appropriate to test the visual modality and needs more technical prospecting, (3) holding water provoked territorial behaviours and seems to be promising for the investigation into the role of the chemical channel in this species. Our findings suggest that unimodal signals are non-redundant but how different sensory modalities interplay during communication remains largely unknown in fish.
