Predator-induced behavioral and morphological plasticity in the tropical marine Gastropod Strombus gigas

Florida queen conch stocks once supported a significant fishery, but overfishing prompted the state of Florida to institute a harvest moratorium in 1985. Despite the closure of the fishery, the queen conch population has been slow to recover. One method used in the efforts to restore the Florida conch population has been to release hatchery-reared juvenile conch into the wild; however, suboptimal predator avoidance responses and lighter shell weights relative to their wild counterparts have been implicated in the high mortality rates of released hatchery juveniles. We conducted a series of experiments in which hatchery-reared juvenile conch were exposed to a predator, the spiny lobster (Panulirus argus), to determine whether they could develop behavioral and morphological characteristics that would improve survival. Experiments were conducted in tanks with a calcareous sand substrate to simulate a natural environment. Conditioned conch were exposed to caged lobsters while conch in the control tanks were exposed to empty cages. Conditioned conch moved significantly less and buried themselves more frequently than the naive control conch. Morphometric data indicated that the conditioned conch grew at a significantly slower rate than the naive conch, but the shell weights of the two groups were not significantly different. This implies that the conditioned conch had thicker or denser shells than the control group. As a result, the conditioned conch had significantly higher survival than naive conch in a subsequent predation experiment in which a lobster was allowed to roam free in each tank for 24 hours. In the future, the conditioning protocols documented in this study will be used to increase the survival of hatchery-reared conch in the wild.