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Prior contest information: mechanisms underlying winner and loser effects

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Abstract

Animals’ contest performance is influenced by their recent contest experiences. This influence could either be exerted by individuals re-estimating their own fighting ability (self-assessment) or by their opponents responding to status-related cues (social-cue mechanism) or both. Individuals of Kryptolebias marmoratus, a hermaphroditic killifish, were given different contest experiences to examine how two opponents’ prior experiences combined to determine their contest interaction and to test both of these mechanisms as potential causes of the observed experience effect. Our data showed that losers’ decisions to retreat at different stages of a contest were influenced by their own but not by the winners’ contest experience—a result consistent with self-assessment but not with the social-cue mechanism. An association between the fish initiating and winning contests thus probably arose because both were correlated with an individual’s assessment of its fighting ability, but not because initiating contests made opponents more inclined to retreat.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Alan Watson for help with comments and on the manuscript. We would like to thank Michael Taborsky and two other reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. This research was supported by Taiwan National Science Council (NSC 91-2316-B-003-001, 92-2311-B-003-009). Experiments were conducted in accordance with a protocol approved by The Animal Care and Use Committee of National Taiwan Normal University (permit #92019) and conformed to guidelines of the Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan, Republic of China.

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  1. Department of Life Science, National Taiwan Normal University, 88, Section 4, Ting-Chou Rd, Taipei, 116, Taiwan

    Yuying Hsu, I-Han Lee & Chung-Kai Lu

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  1. Yuying Hsu
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  2. I-Han Lee
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  3. Chung-Kai Lu
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Correspondence to Yuying Hsu.

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Communicated by T. Bakker

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Hsu, Y., Lee, IH. & Lu, CK. Prior contest information: mechanisms underlying winner and loser effects. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 63, 1247–1257 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-009-0791-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-009-0791-9

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