Territorial defense in a network: Audiences only matter to male fiddler crabs primed for confrontation
Darden, SK; May, MK; Boyland, NK; et al.Dabelsteen, T
Date: 5 April 2019
Journal
Behavioral Ecology
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Territorial contests often occur in the presence of conspecifics not directly involved in the interaction. Actors may alter their behavior
in the presence of this audience, an “audience effect,” and audiences themselves may alter their behavior as a result of observing an
interaction, a “bystander effect.” Previous work has documented ...
Territorial contests often occur in the presence of conspecifics not directly involved in the interaction. Actors may alter their behavior
in the presence of this audience, an “audience effect,” and audiences themselves may alter their behavior as a result of observing an
interaction, a “bystander effect.” Previous work has documented these effects by looking at each in isolation, but to our knowledge,
none has investigated their interaction; something that is more likely to represent a realistic scenario for species where individuals
aggregate spatially. We therefore have a somewhat limited understanding of the extent and direction of these potentially complex
indirect social effects on behavior. Here, we examined how audience and bystander effects work in tandem to modify resident male
aggressive behavior towards intruders in European fiddler crabs, Afruca tangeri. We found that male crabs with an audience showed
greater aggressive behavior towards an intruder compared with males without an audience, but only if they had acted as a bystander
to an aggressive signaling interaction prior to the intrusion. Indeed, bystanding during aggressive interactions elevated aggressive
responses to intruders maximally if there was an audience present. Our results suggest that bystanding had a priming effect on territory-holding males, potentially by providing information on the immediate level of competition in the local neighborhood, and that
same-sex audiences only matter if males have been primed. This study highlights the fundamental importance of considering broader
interaction networks in studying real-world dyadic interactions and of including nonvertebrate taxonomic groups in these studies
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