Phenotypic plasticity in response to fine-grained environmental variation in predation

1. In nature, organisms experience environmental variability at coarse-grained (inter-generational) and fine-grained (intra-generational) scales and a common response to environmental variation is phenotypic plasticity. The emphasis of most empirical work on plasticity has been on examining coarse-grained variation with the goal of understanding the costs and benefits of plastic responses in response to a particular environment. 2. In this study, we investigated the effects of fine-grained variation in predation on the inducible defences of larval wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) by widely altering the density and feeding schedule of caged predators (Dytiscus spp.) while holding average predation constant. 3. We found that predator cues induced change in tadpole behaviour, morphology, and mass. Surprisingly, however, temporal variation in predation did not cause the tadpoles to alter their activity (compared to a constant predation treatment) or mass. Temporal variation in predation did alter tadpole tail depth, but only when experiencing our most extreme variation treatment in which the predators were fed once every 8 days. Under these conditions, the predator-induced tadpole tail was less extreme compared to environments containing constant predation. 4. While a number of previous studies have examined behavioural responses of prey to temporal variation in predation risk without holding average predation constant, this appears to be the first test of temporal variation per se. As in previous studies of organism responses to temporal variation in resources, our results suggest that fine-grained environmental variability can affect the expression of phenotypically plastic traits, but our tadpoles appear to be generally unresponsive to this fine-grained variation for many of their traits.