Meeting Abstract
Shelters are an important resource for animals as they provide protection from the elements, predators and conspecifics. Animals often engage in aggressive interactions when competing for access to shelters. Aggression seems to correlate well with the spacing and density of shelters in various animal systems; dominant individuals have been shown to display more aggressive behaviors when shelters are closer together. While there have been studies that have examined the effects of both density and abundance on aggression, in crayfish, few studies have analyzed density independently to observe its influence on these behaviors. For this study three tanks of varying diameters, (152.4 cm, 91.44 cm and 60.96 cm) were setup with 4 shelters that were evenly spaced throughout each environment. Four crayfish were placed in each experimental setup and allowed to interact for a period of 24 hours. The density of shelters correlates directly with the size of the experimental tank (smaller tanks represent a denser shelter configuration than larger tanks). Agonistic interactions between the crayfish are being quantified to assess the number of aggressive encounters, maximum intensity of each encounter, and the number of shelter evictions in each experiment. The goal of this study is to assess how shelter density impacts agonistic interactions within populations of the crayfish, Orconectes rusticus.
