Abstract
Holding a territory is often crucial in order to acquire key resources, including mating partners. However, few studies have investigated the role of animal personality in the context of territorial conflicts and how the contest outcome itself may influence personality traits. We studied personality in male Speckled wood butterflies, Pararge aegeria, before and after territorial contests for sunspot territories. Before interactions, boldness decreased with age, while activity and exploration were only influenced by ambient conditions. Neither age nor morphology did influence the probability to win contests, but winners were more active and more explorative than losers and, moreover, males that received a red wing mark were more likely to be winners. Butterflies that lost a contest showed pronounced behavioural changes. Mean boldness increased and its repeatability was disrupted, while no such change was detected in winners. The observed boldness increase in losers may be explained by a ‘desperado effect’, though its implication for successive contests remains unknown. Given that territoriality is expected to have important consequences for reproductive success, our results suggest that personality traits may indirectly contribute to individual fitness by influencing the ability to gain access to mate-location patches.
Highlights
Resource acquisition often results in conflicts among conspecifics and animals may use auditory, visual or olfactory cues to deter potential competitors
Male Gryllus bimaculatus crickets that experienced repeated defeats reduced their mobility and avoided conspecifics later on[9], while winner and loser effects depended on behavioural type in the Rainbow trout Onchorhyncus mykiss[10]
The number of studies is relatively small, the authors suggest that personality traits like boldness and aggressiveness can contribute to resource-holding potential’ (RHP)
Summary
Resource acquisition often results in conflicts among conspecifics and animals may use auditory, visual or olfactory cues to deter potential competitors. -called personality traits have been reported from a wide range of taxa[12] and often co-vary with each other, forming behavioural syndromes[13] They are linked to important eco-evolutionary processes[14] and they influence individual fitness components such as survival[15,16,17] and reproductive success[18,19,20]. Encounters with conspecific males usually result in a brief chase or in escalated contests The latter typically involve aerial interactions between the opponents in the form of mid-air circling manoeuvres and end with one butterfly giving up the contest[26]. Contests have been widely studied and outcomes have been shown to depend on both morphological and physiological traits such as body size and age, the magnitude to which these traits influence contest outcomes seems to vary among species (see[28] and references therein). Because bold individuals may suffer from increased predation risk[35], and because young animals have higher future fitness expectations than older conspecifics, we predict young individuals to show reduced risk-taking behavior[36]
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