Sensory Compensation To Predation Risk: Scent versus Hydrodynamic Cue Use by a Temperate Reef Fish (In prep)
Sensory compensation is well aware to anyone who has tried to find a light switch in the dark (we start using sound to help sense our surroundings) or to anyone who knew dinner was ready before your parents yelled to you or smelled smoke before you saw something burning (you used scent). Expanding on earlier work by Will Fennie at OSU, we took predator cues and blindly administered them to a territorial temperate reef fish Blackeye Goby Rhinogobiops nicholsii and determined that (1) they were able to detect predators by using scent cues, and (2) this varied with the amount of ambient water motion suggesting sensitivity to the cue versus the motion motion from the application of the cue had changed. Future work will continue to use gobies as a study species to incorporate the relative importance of visual/chemical/hydrodynamic cues to detect predators and conspecifics.
Contrasting fear responses by red and white abalone (in prep)
Fear responses by prey can lead to higher survival and reproduction. Fear responses to an intertidal seastar were expressed by red abalone but not white abalone. A better understanding of where and when white abalone respond to predators may help increase field out-planting success and ultimately to restoration of natural populations.