科研之友
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摘要
Various environmental and social factors can bias who wins and who loses a fight, but less is known about how these factors interact with each other to affect contest outcome. We examined this issue in the white-footed mouse, Peromyscus leucopus, as males of this species illustrate great flexibility in aggressive and territorial tactics in the field and in the laboratory. We found that the effects of both residency status and resource abundance (food, water and cover from predators) increased winning ability; however, there was no interaction between these two effects. As such, the impacts of residency and resource abundance on winning might represent two distinct behavioural phenomena that manifest via different mechanisms. We also found that mice that urine-marked an open arena at a high frequency were more likely to win fights in resource-rich environments compared to resource-poor environments. Meanwhile, mice that urine-marked the same type of environment at a substantially lower frequency did not show this behavioural difference between contexts. Because urinary marking behaviour is allied with aspects of risk-taking behaviour and social status, this result implies that males integrate information about their relative 'boldness' with information from their environment to make context-appropriate tactical decisions about fighting. We speculate that our data illustrate real-time, decision-making processes that are a necessary component of conditional strategies used to optimize fitness.
- 出版日期2010-11
