Abstract
The question of why territorial residents usually win asymmetrical owner-intruder contests is critical to our understanding of animal contest evolution. Game theory suggests that, under certain conditions, residency could be used as an arbitrary means of contest settlement in a manner analogous to tossing a coin. Key empirical support for this idea is provided by a study on the speckled wood butterfly (Pararge aegeria); however, this result has proven controversial. We show conclusively that residency does not serve as an arbitrary cue for contest settlement in this species. By means of a series of manipulative experiments, conducted on two phenotypically divergent populations of P. aegeria, we also rule out the recently presented alternative that contests are settled due to resource-correlated asymmetries in thoracic temperature. Our results instead suggest that more intrinsically aggressive males accumulate as residents and continue to win due to the self-reinforcing effect of prior winning experience. Truly arbitrary contest settlement may be rare or non-existent in the wild.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1707-1711 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences |
| Volume | 271 |
| Issue number | 1549 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 22 Aug 2004 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Bourgeois
- Butterfly
- Sexual selection
- Territoriality
- Uncorrelated asymmetry