By Susan Milius
Foreign turtles may do so well at invading Europe in part because they get the drop on tadpoles more readily than their native counterparts.
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Several kinds of Spanish tadpoles were less likely to grow wary at the presence of newly arrived turtle species compared with their longtime native predators, according to a study by Nuria Polo-Cavia of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and her colleagues.
The invaders could thus be gaining an advantage over natives in competing for food, Polo-Cavia and her colleagues suggest in a paper to appear in Animal Behaviour.