Journal
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ZOOLOGY
Volume 99, Issue 4, Pages 299-307Publisher
CANADIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING
DOI: 10.1139/cjz-2020-0207
Keywords
stress; block of memory; kairomones; Lymnaea stagnalis
Categories
Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) [227993-2019]
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This study found that individual exposure to stressors can enhance long-term memory formation in great pond snails, but the combination of two stressors can block this formation. By experimenting with different conditions, researchers also discovered that hot crayfish effluent and room temperature effluent have different effects on LTM formation.
Stress plays an important role in memory formation in the great pond snail (Lymnaea stagnalis (Linnaeus, 1758)). Individual stressors have been shown to enhance or to perturb long-term memory (LTM) formation. However, when snails perceive a combination of two stressors, it is unclear the outcome with regards to LTM formation. Here we first show that when L. stagnalis are exposed individually to either a predator stressor (crayfish effluent (CE), which is a kairomone) or a thermal stressor (30 degrees C), LTM formation is enhanced. In their natural environment, L. stagnalis may experience temperatures approaching 30 degrees C and they may encounter crayfish at the same time. How such a combination of stressors alters adaptive behaviour is unknown. Here we show that when these two stressors are combined, LTM formation is blocked. Since boiling CE inactivates the kairomone, we used previously boiled CE that we combined with the thermal stressor and found that LTM formation is again enhanced. These data show that (i) it cannot accurately be predicted how a combination of stressors when combined interact to alter LTM formation and (ii) there is a difference between hot CE and room temperature CE.
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