Mice use predictive environmental cues to adapt predatory behavior in hunting tasks of variable difficulty

Abstract

Prey capture has long served as a model of complex, multimodal behavior with ethological relevance. In this context, the ability of laboratory animals to capture fleeing prey has been investigated in terms of the sensory systems and neuroanatomical regions required for successful capture. While the ability to hunt is experience-dependent, prey capture is often assumed to be a reflexive behavior, governed by innate neural circuits and a basic drive to obtain food. Whether hunting performance depends on complex learning and cognitive strategy remains largely untested, in part because it is difficult to systematically manipulate the difficulty of predator-prey interactions. To address this, we varied ambient temperature across thousands of trials in which laboratory mice pursued cold-blooded cockroaches, whose movement speed was directly determined by body temperature. As expected, capture difficulty increased as a function of temperature. To test whether mice rely on external cues to adjust their predatory behavior, we then mismatched the ambient temperature and that of the prey, finding that mice learn to use relevant environmental information to inform their hunting strategy. Our results suggest that animals can extract and apply meaningful information from predictive environmental cues to adapt their learned behavior.