Interspecific assistance: fiddler crabs help heterospecific neighbours in territory defence
Theory predicts that territory owners will help established neighbours to repel intruders, when doing so is less costly than renegotiating boundaries with successful usurpers of neighbouring territories. Here, we show for the first time, to our knowledge, cooperative territory defence between heterospecific male neighbours in the fiddler crabs Uca elegans and Uca mjoebergi . We show experimentally that resident U. elegans were equally likely to help a smaller U. mjoebergi or U. elegans neighbour during simulated intrusions by intermediate sized U. elegans males (50% of cases for both). Helping was, however, significantly less likely to occur when the intruder was a U. mjoebergi male (only 15% of cases).
Keyword(s):
2010 ◽
Vol 277
(1700)
◽
pp. 3685-3692
◽
1984 ◽
Vol 42
◽
pp. 196-197
Keyword(s):
1991 ◽
Vol 49
◽
pp. 706-707
1991 ◽
Vol 49
◽
pp. 956-957
◽
1986 ◽
Vol 44
◽
pp. 514-515
1996 ◽
Vol 54
◽
pp. 680-681
1993 ◽
Vol 51
◽
pp. 866-867
Keyword(s):
2020 ◽
Vol 5
(2)
◽
pp. 463-478