In recent decades, theoretical and empirical work has investigated the relative roles of costs and benefits in inhibiting excessive displays of begging to parents. Whether costs are important in maintaining reliability of ...

C. fitzingeri was observed in amplexus with a large female R. haematiticus at Sarapiquí, Costa Rica

Aposematic coloration allows predators to use visual cues to avoid eating potentially toxic or distasteful prey. Predators across many animal taxa actively avoid aposematically colored prey and remember distasteful brightly ...

Clay models have been used to investigate the relative antipredator effectiveness of cryptic and of aposematic coloration in litter frogs, but such studies do not account for possible differences in prey escape behavior. ...

The Palo Verde wetland, one of the most important places for aquatic organisms in Costa Rica, is currently recovering from an invasive expansion of Typha domingensis (cattail). A monitoring program was designed to understand ...

Parents can benefit from allocating limited resources non randomly among offspring, and offspring solicitation (i.e. begging) is often hypothesized to evolve because it contains information valuable to choosy parents. We ...

Effective coordination of behaviors such as foraging and avoiding predators requires an assessment of cues provided by other organisms. Integrating cues from multiple sensory modalities may enhance the assessment. We studied ...

Offspring discrimination, the differential treatment of offspring and unrelated young, functions in numerous animal taxa to ensure that vital and costly parental care behaviours are appropriately directed. Discrimination ...

Despite the benefit of the tympanic middle ear to airborne hearing sensitivity, anurans range in how soon they develop functional middle ears after transitioning to life on land. Previous evi- dence suggested that bufonids ...

Parents in many taxa, including insects, mol- luscs, fish, snakes, and amphibians provision chemical defences, such as peptides, steroids, or alkaloids to their offspring to reduce the risk of predation. In most cases, ...