|
|
Experimental research of specificity of fear of snake: coral snake pattern
Průšová, Lucie ; Frynta, Daniel (advisor) ; Veselý, Petr (referee)
Due to shared coevolutionary history of snakes and primates with snakes acting as their main predators, snakes elicit fear in most of the primates, humans included. Humans are able to notice a stimulus that elicits fear, e.g., a snake, much faster. Such ability might have surely positively affected their survival in the past. In the nature, aposematic coloration acts as a warning of a dangerous prey to its predators not to devour it. The highly poisonous American coral snakes have this coloration pattern. The harmless king snakes of the Central and North Americas gain an anti-predatory advantage by becoming the coral snakes 'Batesian mimics, copying their bright pattern. Such pattern elicits an innate fear reaction in various species of wild birds who avoid a mere contact with patterned plastic dummies. The question arises whether other taxa, including primates and humans, generally recognize such pattern as dangerous. The aim of this study was to find whether humans fear coral snakes, although they have not long coevolutionary history with them. Further it was analyze, which visual factors of the snakes affect this fear reaction (i.e., a warning coloration, pattern or shape of snake). The atractiveness of these snakes was tested. Another question was whether humans are able to intuitively recognize...
|
|
|
Human preference to animal species and its impact on species conservation
Marešová, Jana ; Frynta, Daniel (advisor) ; Komárek, Stanislav (referee) ; Sedláček, František (referee)
The dissertation thesis deals with human aesthetic preference to other species and its anthropological and conservation aspect. The aesthetic preference to animal species has rarely been systematically studied before and quantitative analyses, especially on a fine taxonomic scale did not exist. On the other hand, it was known that attractive species often receive more support for their conservation. From these simple facts rose the idea to test human aesthetic preference to snake species (and consequently to species across major vertebrate taxa) and use this quantified preference to explain the conservation effort devoted to captive breeding worldwide (measured as size of zoo populations). We confirmed that the perceived attractiveness (preference and/or species' body size) succesfully predicts the size of zoo populations across mammal, bird and reptile taxa. On contrary, we found no effect of the IUCN listing of the species. To find out whether we work with Czech students' preference only or we may generalize to other populations, we carried out the same experiment to determine human preference to boas and pythons in eight cultures of five continents. Despite profound differences of the studied ethnics, we revealed a considerable agreement. Moreover, we found an agreement between pre-school...
|
guest ::
