Determinado a brigar: uso do teste de desvio para avaliar a motivação em peixe donzela

Abstract

The motivation of an animal to perform a task refers to the internal drive that leads it to carry out the necessary actions to achieve a specific goal. This motivation can be fueled by a variety of factors, including the pursuit of rewards, avoidance of punishments, satisfaction of physiological needs, or the search for essential resources for survival, such as food, water, shelter, or reproduction. The stimuli that trigger the response, i.e., the incentive to perform a task, can be highly relevant to the animal, generating greater persistence in carrying out the necessary task to reach it, even in the face of obstacles or challenges. In this study, we propose a motivation-guided detour task related to defending a territorial area, a typical behavior of the damselfish species used here, Stegastes fuscus. In this task, the animal is placed in a long tank, 150 cm in length, and must swim its entire length to confront a conspecific located in an adjacent tank (visual stimulus only). Over the test days, barriers with doors were added to the tank, so that the tested animal needed to detour through the doors to reach the end of the tank. Every time the fish passed through the barrier, an additional barrier was inserted into the tank for the next test, totaling a maximum of 8 barriers. Two groups of damselfish were tested: one group that had the presence of a conspecific at the end of the tank as an incentive and a group without stimulus (control). We observed that the performance and motivation to pass through the barriers and reach the end of the tank were significantly higher in the animals that had a conspecific as a stimulus. Furthermore, the animals with the stimulus reduced the latency to cover the tank and increased the average swimming speed over the days compared to the control group. The motivation of animals plays a fundamental role in adaptation and survival in the natural environment. Understanding how the salience of the incentive affects motivated behavior and how ecological responses are related to these behavioral patterns is crucial for understanding animal ecology and behavior.