Fighting in fiddler crabs Uca mjoebergi: what determines duration?

By Lesley J. Morrell, P. Backwell, N. Metcalfe. 2005

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Contest duration in animals is often interpreted as being a consequence of mutual assessment of the difference in the competitors' resource-holding potential (RHP), allowing the inferior individual to avoid costly interactions it is likely to lose. Duration is thus predicted by the relative size of the competitors, and increases as the difference between them decreases. Alternatively, each individual may persist in accordance with thresholds determined by its own RHP, and weaker rivals retreat because they have lower thresholds. Contest duration depends on the RHP of the contestant that gives up first. Recent work suggests that even though duration is determined by the loser's size, this hypothesis also predicts a negative correlation between duration and the relative RHP of the contestants. However, it predicts (unlike the mutual assessment hypothesis) that contest duration should increase with the mean size of the contestants. We studied the determinants of fighting duration in the fiddler crab Uca mjoebergi. Fight duration increased with increasing size of the loser, and decreased, but to a lesser extent, with increasing size of the winner. Fights between size-matched individuals increased in duration with increasing mean size of the competitors. Neither the mutual assessment nor own-RHP-dependent persistence hypotheses can accurately explain the data. Instead, we present a modification of recent modelling work, and suggest that in U. mjoebergi individual cost thresholds may determine duration, but that larger opponents may inflict those costs more rapidly, consistent with the cumulative assessment game of animal conflict.

Subfields: Ecology, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99b77c9851a60321f2d833888c9d40ade50fdebb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. G. Arnott
2. A. Reddon
3. S. Marsh-Rollo
4. S. Balshine
5. R. W. Elwood
6. P. Backwell
7. M. R. Voisin
8. Nandini Menon

In Safety Research

1. R. W. Elwood
2. G. Arnott

In Sociology and Political Science

1. G. Arnott
2. R. W. Elwood
3. L. Reaney
4. P. Backwell
5. A. Reddon
6. S. Balshine

Citations in the corpus

• Dishonest signalling of fighting ability and multiple performance traits in the fiddler crab Uca mjoebergi (2009, background): “Given both the previously demonstrated general importance of rival claw assessment to male combat in fiddler crabs (Backwell et al. 2000; Morrell et al. 2005; Reaney et al. 2008), and the fact that U.”
• Fighting for harems: assessment strategies during male–male contests in the sexually dimorphic Wellington tree weta (2006, unknown): “Fights between Wellington tree weta, similar to fights in other animal species (Jennings et al. 2005; Morrell et al. 2005), agree with several shared predictions of the energetic war of attrition and the cumulative and sequential assessment models.”
• Assessment of fighting ability in animal contests (2009, methodology): “For example, the findings of Morrell et al. (2005) on size-assortative fighting suggest that some assessment of the opponentmay occur before an individual decides to engage in an interaction, although later they appear to fight according to CAM.”
• Rules of engagement for resource contests in a social fish (2011, result): “Contests in a wide variety of taxa appear to be consistent with the logic of self-assessment (Bridge et al. 2000; Morrell et al. 2005; Prenter et al. 2006; Stuart-Fox 2006; Brandt & Swallow 2009).”