Abstract
There is now a plethora of studies showing that owners of a resource are advantaged in pairwise contests for that resource. There are also many explanations: the use of ownership as an arbitrary cue for contest settlement, the accumulation of competitively superior individuals as owners, the presence of mechanistic advantages for owners, and owners perceiving a higher value for the contested resource. Several studies have attempted to unravel these influences using manipulative experimentation. In a recent study on Tasmanian snow skinks (Niveoscincus microlepidotus) 1, Olsson and Shine take a complementary approach. By observing naturally occurring contests between skinks of known identity, they contrasted the importance of ownership and physical attributes to contest outcome.
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