Male Iberian rock lizards may reduce the costs of fighting by scent matching of the resource holders |
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Authors: | Pilar López José Martín |
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Institution: | 1.Departamento de Ecología Evolutiva,Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, C.S.I.C.,Madrid,Spain |
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Abstract: | Animals should adopt strategies to minimize the costs of intraspecific aggressive interactions. For example, individuals should
be able to identify resource holders in advance and avoid fighting with them because residents are generally more likely than
intruders escalate aggression. It has been suggested that scent marks function mainly to allow competitor assessment by conveying
the costs of entering a scent-marked area. Individuals may identify territory owners by comparing the scent of substrate marks
with the scent of any conspecific they encounter nearby, assessing whether these two scents match or not, a mechanism known
as scent matching. Here, we examined the response of male Iberolacerta cyreni lizards to areas scent-marked by other males and the potential role of scent matching in agonistic interactions. We designed
a laboratory experiment where we allowed a male to explore the scent-marked substrate of another male, and then we immediately
staged agonistic encounters in a nearby clean neutral area with either the male that had produced the scent marks (matching
treatment) or with a different non-matching individual male. The higher chemosensory exploratory rates of substrate scent
marks in comparison to clean substrates suggested that males detected and spent more time exploring scent marks to obtain
information on the donor male. Moreover, this information was later used to decide the fighting strategy. Intruding males
delayed time until the first agonistic interaction, reduced the intensity of fights and the number of aggressive interactions,
and won less interactions with males which scent matched that of scent marks (because they would be considered as the territory
owners) than with other non-matching individuals. Our results show that male I. cyreni lizards use scent matching as a mechanism to assess the ownership status of other males, which could contribute to modulate
intrasexual aggression, reducing costs of agonistic interactions. |
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