Social Learning of Acquiring Novel Feeding Habit in Mandarin Fish (Siniperca chuatsi)
1
College of Fisheries, Chinese Perch Research Center, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China
2
Freshwater Aquaculture Collaborative Innovation Center of Hubei Province, Wuhan 430070, China
3
Key Lab of Freshwater Animal Breeding, Ministry of Agriculture, Wuhan 430070, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†
Those authors contribute equally to this work.
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2019, 20(18), 4399; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms20184399
Received: 3 August 2019
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Revised: 29 August 2019
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Accepted: 2 September 2019
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Published: 7 September 2019
(This article belongs to the Section Molecular Biology)
Social learning plays important roles in gaining new foraging skills and food preferences. However, the potential role and molecular mechanism of social learning in acquiring new feeding habits is less clear in fish. In the present study, we examined the success rate of feeding habit domestication from live prey fish to dead prey fish, as well as the food intake of dead prey fish in mandarin fish with or without feeders of dead prey fish as demonstrators. Here, we found that mandarin fish can learn from each other how to solve novel foraging tasks, feeding on dead prey fish. In addition, the analysis of gene expressions and signaling pathways of learning through Western blotting and transcriptome sequencing shows that the expression of the c-fos, fra2, zif268, c/ebpd and sytIV genes were significantly increased, and the anorexigenic pomc and leptin a expressions were decreased in fish of the learning group. The phosphorylation levels of protein kinase A (PKA) and Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) in the learning group were significantly higher than those of the control group, while the phosphorylation level of S6 ribosomal protein (S6) was lower. With the inhibitors of PKA and CaMKII signaling and the chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assay, we further found that the social learning of new feeding habits in mandarin fish could be attributed to the activation of the CaMKII signaling pathway and then the stimulation of the expression of the c-fos gene, which might be an important transcriptional factor to inhibit the expression of the anorexigenic gene pomc, resulting in the food intake of dead prey fish in mandarin fish. Altogether, our results support the hypothesis that social learning could facilitate the acquisition of novel feeding habits in fish, and it considerably increases the rate of subsequent individual food intake and domestication through the interaction between the learning gene c-fos and the appetite control gene pomc.
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Keywords:
social learning; feeding habit; domestication; mandarin fish; c-Fos; appetite control gene
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MDPI and ACS Style
Peng, J.; Dou, Y.-Q.; Liang, H.; He, S.; Liang, X.-F.; Shi, L.-J. Social Learning of Acquiring Novel Feeding Habit in Mandarin Fish (Siniperca chuatsi). Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2019, 20, 4399. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms20184399
AMA Style
Peng J, Dou Y-Q, Liang H, He S, Liang X-F, Shi L-J. Social Learning of Acquiring Novel Feeding Habit in Mandarin Fish (Siniperca chuatsi). International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2019; 20(18):4399. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms20184399
Chicago/Turabian StylePeng, Jian, Ya-Qi Dou, Hui Liang, Shan He, Xu-Fang Liang, and Lin-Jie Shi. 2019. "Social Learning of Acquiring Novel Feeding Habit in Mandarin Fish (Siniperca chuatsi)" International Journal of Molecular Sciences 20, no. 18: 4399. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms20184399
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