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Scriba, MF, Gasparini, J, Jacquin, L, Mettke-Hofmann, C, Rattenborg, NC and Roulin, A (2016) The effect of food quality during growth on spatial memory consolidation in adult pigeons. Journal of Experimental Biology. ISSN 1477-9145
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Abstract
Poor environmental conditions experienced during early development can have negative long-term consequences on fitness. Animals can compensate negative developmental effects through phenotypic plasticity by diverting resources from non-vital to vital traits such as spatial memory to enhance foraging efficiency. We tested in young feral pigeons (Columba livia) how diets of different nutritional value during development affect the capacity to retrieve food hidden in a spatially complex environment, a process we refer to as “spatial memory”. Parents were fed either with high- or low-quality food from egg laying until young fledged, after which all young pigeons received the same high quality diet until the memory performance was tested at 6 months of age. The pigeons were trained to learn a food location out of 18 possible locations in one session, and then their memory of this location was tested 24 hours later. Birds reared with the low-quality diet made fewer errors in the memory test. These results demonstrate that food quality during development has long-lasting effects on memory, with moderate nutritional deficit improving spatial memory performance in a foraging context. It might be that under poor feeding conditions resources are redirected from non-vital to vital traits, or pigeons raised with low-quality food might be better in using environmental cues like the position of the sun to find back where food was hidden.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Uncontrolled Keywords: | 06 Biological Sciences, 11 Medical And Health Sciences |
| Subjects: | Q Science > QH Natural history Q Science > QH Natural history > QH301 Biology Q Science > QL Zoology |
| Divisions: | Natural Sciences & Psychology (closed 31 Aug 19) |
| Publisher: | The Company of Biologists Ltd. |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jan 2017 08:46 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Sep 2021 12:08 |
| DOI or ID number: | 10.1242/jeb.152454 |
| URI: | https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/5209 |
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