Tadpoles rely on mechanosensory stimuli for communication when visual capabilities are poor

The ways in which animals sense the world changes throughout development. For example, young of many species have limited visual capabilities, but still make social decisions, likely based on information gathered through other sensory modalities. Poison frog tadpoles display complex social behaviors that have been suggested to rely on vision despite a century of research indicating tadpoles have poorly-developed visual systems relative to adults. Alternatively, other sensory modalities, such as the lateral line system, are functional at hatching in frogs and may guide social decisions while other sensory systems mature. Here, we examined development of the mechanosensory lateral line and visual systems in tadpoles of the mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) that use vibrational begging displays to stimulate egg feeding from their mothers. We found that tadpoles hatch with a fully developed lateral line system. While begging behavior increases with development, ablating the lateral li..., Ranitomeya imitator tadpole transcriptome: Thirty R. imitator tadpoles in an unrelated study were anesthetized with benzocaine and euthanized by cervical transection. Eyes, brains, and intestines were placed in RNAlater. RNA was extracted from each tissue using Trizol (ThermoFisher, Waltham, MA, USA) according to manufacturer instructions. Poly-adenylated RNA was isolated from each sample using the NEXTflex PolyA Bead kit (Bioo Scientific, Austin, TX, USA) according to manufacturer instructions. Strand-specific libraries for each sample were prepared using the dUTP NEXTflex RNAseq kit (Bioo Scientific). Libraries were pooled in equimolar amounts after library quantification using both quantitative PCR with the KAPA Library Quantification Kit (KAPA Biosystems, Wilmington, MA, USA) and the fluorometric Qubit dsDNA high sensitivity assay kit (Life Technologies, Carlsbad, CA, USA), both according to manufacturer instructions. Libraries were sequenced on an Illumina HiSeq 2500 over a full fl..., , # Tadpoles rely on mechanosensory stimuli for communication when visual capabilities are poor

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h9w0vt4s2](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h9w0vt4s2)

## Description of the data and file structure

Supplemental Excel File contains output from the phosphoTRAP analysis, including the count matrix output from DESeq2, a list of significantly enriched or depleted transcripts in begging and non-begging tadpoles, and a GO enrichment analysis on transcripts depleted in begging tadpoles. This file can be viewed in Excel or Google Sheets.

An *R. imitator* transcriptome is included. This was de novo assembled from Illumina reads obtained from sequencing RNA from eyes, brain, and intestines of thirty R. imitator tadpoles. This can be viewed with a text editor.

The included R script contains the R code used in the phosphoTRAP analysis. This can be viewed or used in R. Required packages include glmmTMB, dplyr, stringr, Biostrings, and ggplot2.

The video includes an exam...