Abstract

Mantis shrimp commonly inhabit seafloor environments with an abundance of visual features including conspecifics, predators, prey, and landmarks used for navigation. While these animals are capable of discriminating color and polarization, it is unknown what specific attributes of a visual object are important during recognition. Here we show that mantis shrimp of the species Neogonodactylus oerstedii are able to learn the shape of a trained target (p=0.048). Further, when the shape and color of a target which they had been trained to identify were placed in conflict, N. oerstedii tended to choose the target of the trained shape over the target of the trained color (p=0.054). Thus, we conclude that the shape of the target was more salient than its color during recognition by N. oerstedii, suggesting that the shapes of objects, such as landmarks or other animals, are important for their identification by the species.