Prior contest information: mechanisms underlying winner and loser effects

Animals' contest performance is influenced by their recent contest experiences. This influence could either be exerted by individuals re-estimating their own fighting ability (self-assessment) or by their opponents responding to status-related cues (social-cue mechanism) or both. Individuals of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavioral ecology and sociobiology 2009-07, Vol.63 (9), p.1247-1257
Main Authors: Hsu, Yuying, Lee, I-Han, Lu, Chung-Kai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agonistic behavior
Animal behavior
Animal Ecology
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Fighting fishes
Fish
Human aggression
Life Sciences
Odors
Original Paper
Social behavior
Social interaction
Testosterone
Tilapia
Urine
Zoology
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Summary:Animals' contest performance is influenced by their recent contest experiences. This influence could either be exerted by individuals re-estimating their own fighting ability (self-assessment) or by their opponents responding to status-related cues (social-cue mechanism) or both. Individuals of Kryptolebias marmoratus, a hermaphroditic killifish, were given different contest experiences to examine how two opponents' prior experiences combined to determine their contest interaction and to test both of these mechanisms as potential causes of the observed experience effect. Our data showed that losers' decisions to retreat at different stages of a contest were influenced by their own but not by the winners' contest experience--a result consistent with self-assessment but not with the social-cue mechanism. An association between the fish initiating and winning contests thus probably arose because both were correlated with an individual's assessment of its fighting ability, but not because initiating contests made opponents more inclined to retreat.
ISSN:0340-5443
1432-0762
DOI:10.1007/s00265-009-0791-9