Spontaneous alternation and locomotor activity in three species of marine crabs: green crab (Carcinus maenas), blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), and fiddler crab (Uca pugnax)

Abstract

Spontaneous alternation refers to the tendency of organisms to explore places that they have least recently visited. Our previous work showed that alternation performance of Carcinus maenas (invasive European green crab) was significantly higher than Callinectes sapidus (native blue crab), and chance level performance (Ramey, P. A., Teichman, E., Oleksiak, J., & Balci, F. [2009]. Spontaneous alternation in marine crabs: Invasive versus native species. Behavioural Processes, 82, 51-55.). In the current study, we first tested the robustness of these findings in the absence of visual cues, longer test durations, and wider maze dimensions. These manipulations enabled us to determine whether these two crab species relied on the visual cues provided during the spontaneous alternation task in our prior work, and allowed for better characterization of their exploratory activity in the maze. Our original findings were reproduced in the present study under these new task conditions, suggesting no role for visual cues during alternation, and emphasizing the robustness and generalizability of the corresponding interspecies differences in alternation performance. We also tested whether the lower alternation performance of C. sapidus also applied to another native crab species, Uca pugnax (fiddler crab). Spontaneous alternation performance of U. pugnax was significantly lower than C. maenas but indistinguishable from C. sapidus. Finally, we examined whether the potentially higher inherent risk-sensitivity of C. sapidus could have contributed to their lower alternation performance by testing C. maenas in the presence of a larger natural predator (stressor). Higher risk sensitivity presumably induced by the stressor led to locomotor activity patterns that better resembled those of C. sapidus, however the resultant reduction in alternation performance was not statistically significant.