Austruca lactea, , Takeshita, 2019

Li, Kun-Chang, Chen, Yu-Shiuan, Lin, Wei-Chi & Lin, Hui-Chen, 2022, Fig. 6 in Parascorpaena poseidon Chou and Liao 2022, Zoological Studies 61 (43), pp. 1-11 : 9

Austruca lactea males may wander to the edge of the stream for food

Austruca lactea males with a good nutritional status have a high UV brightness on their major claw ( Fig. 4 ). This begs the question of how A. lactea males obtain high quality resources in their environment. During our field experiment, we found that males moved to the edge of water line to forage. Our results also indicate that organic content decreases with distance to the upper tidal zone, and the highest organic content was found at the low tide level. Hence, we propose that A. lactea males’ wandering to the edge of the stream may be related to a high quality diet. Some previous studies also support this statement. Takeda (2003) mentioned that A. perplexa males abandon their burrows at the high tide and wander to the low tide level to forage. Murai et al. (1982) examined the wandering behavior of A. lactea males and found a correlation between body size and the likelihood of wandering along the edge of the waterline during low tide. They also indicated that the water’s edge has more organic particles than the mudflat around A. lactea burrows ( Murai et al. 1982). In addition, chlorophyll-a gradually decreased with distance to the low tidal zone ( Allen and Levinton 2014). Thus, male A. lactea maybe obtain high quality resources by wandering to the water’s edge during low tide.

Figures

Fig. 4. Distribution of UV brightness on the major claw between two treatments. A, The distribution of UV brightness between food-added and foodlimited treatments; B, between food-added and control treatments; C, between control and food-limited treatments. The gray area shows the overlap of the 95% confident interval between two treatments.