Abstract
Contest behavior forms an important part of reproductive investment. Life-history theory predicts that as individuals age and their residual reproductive value decreases, they should increase investment in contest behavior. However, other factors such as social experience may also be important in determining age-related variation in contest behavior. To understand how selection acts on contest behavior over an individual's lifetime, it is therefore important to tease apart the effects of age per se from other factors that may vary with age. Here, we independently manipulate male age and social experience to examine their effects on male contest behavior in the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides. We found that social experience, but not age, influenced male contest behavior but that these changes in behavior did not alter contest outcomes. Male size (relative to his opponent) was overwhelmingly the most important factor determining contest outcome. Our results suggest that in systems with high variation in fighting ability among males, there may be little opportunity for selection to act on factors that influence contest outcomes by altering motivation to win.
Highlights
Animals will fight over resources if access to those resources is a constraint on fitness (Briffa and Hardy 2013)
RHP is strongly correlated with asymmetries in the fighting ability of opponents, which are often determined by body size
Male age did not influence contest behavior through any interactions with other terms included in the models
Summary
Animals will fight over resources if access to those resources is a constraint on fitness (Briffa and Hardy 2013) Such contests over critical resources are remarkably widespread among animal taxa, and the outcomes of these contests often have profound consequences for fitness (Wong and Candolin 2005; Eggert et al 2008). Aggressive behavior and contest outcome are dependent on resource holding potential (RHP, Parker 1974), which has been shown to be influenced by 2 primary factors. Motivational asymmetries may be caused by, for example, differences between opponents’ perception of the value of the resource being fought over which may depend on factors such as ownership (e.g., jumping spiders, Phidippus clarus—Kasumovic et al 2011; butterflies, Pararge aegeria—Bergman et al 2010) or reproductive state (e.g., parasitoid wasps, Goniozus nephantidis—Stokkebo and Hardy 2000; dung roller beetles, Canthon cyanellus cyanellus—Chamorro-Florescano et al 2011)
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