Abstract
Responses of 5 eastern turtle doves Streptopelia orientalis to bitter taste quinine and saccharose octaacetate (SOA) were investigated with two-dish preference tests.
1. Marked individual differences were found in preference experiments for the foraging site in which control corns coated with dour of wheat were set to two dishes. Two doves showed no preference for the site and other two rejected one site (statistically significant in 2 out of 3 and in 7 out of 10 experiments, respectively). Another dove rejected one site in an experiment and preferred the site in another one out of 7 experiments.
2. Preference experiments for quinine and flour by olfactory cue alone showed no difference and following results were considered to be caused by taste preference.
3. Treated corns coated with bitter taste and control corns were set to each dish at random in every 3-hr period of trial. Preference experiments were designed as ascendant (from smal to large dose of bitter substance) and the following descendant (from large to small dose) series. Doves that rejected treated corns at certain dose on ascendant series rejected at smaller dose on descendant series. The dose that doves showed aversive response varied individually. Four doves rejected both quinine and SOA but one dove that rejected quinine did not respond to SOA.
4. Doves tended to reject quinine-treated corns at smaller dose than SOA-treated ones both on ascendant and descendant series.
5. Doves do not prefer beans to corns among commercial mixture of grain for doves. And two of 3 doves preferred quinine-treated corns to beans coated with flour.
6. From the results above it is clear that eastern turtle dove do not prefer bitter taste quinine and SOA but they do not always reject the bitter taste.
