Meeting Abstract

P2.36  Thursday, Jan. 5  How does a new contest experience interact with an old one to influence subsequent contest behavior? HUANG, Y*; HSU, Y; National Taiwan Normal University; National Taiwan Normal University yuyun7595@gmail.com

The outcomes of recent contests are known to influence an individual’s behavior in subsequent contests: a winning/losing experience increases/decreases an individual’s aggressiveness and probability of winning a subsequent contest (winner/loser effect). Animals in the field are likely to have multiple contest encounters in a short time, but how these multiple experiences combine to influence an individual’s subsequent contest behavior is rarely explored. In this study, we give individuals of Kryptolebias marmoratus, a mangrove killifish, two contest experiences (2 days and 1 day prior to a staged contest) to examine whether the effects of these two experience were additive or not. The two individuals in a contest were also matched for the outcome of contests that they had taken part in more than one month previously. The results showed that the combined effect of the 1-day and 2-day experiences depended on the outcome of the 1-month contest. In contests between two 1-month winners, two losing experiences combined to have a more-than-additive effect. It is possible that the 1-month winners, had better intrinsic fighting ability, and showed a loser effect only after receiving two consecutive losing experiences. On the other hand, the effects of the 1-day and 2-day experiences appeared additive in contests between two 1-month losers, suggesting that one experience was enough to induce a change in contest behavior in these individuals.