Journal
BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY
Volume 30, Issue 5, Pages 1177-1185Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arz081
Keywords
animal contests; assessment strategy; competition; fighting; mutual assessment; self-assessment; territoriality
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Funding
- Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq) [305561/2014-6]
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Competition for resources is a ubiquitous feature of life, and a central topic in behavioral ecology. Organisms use assessment strategies to resolve contests, which can be delineated into two broad categories by the information individuals use to make decisions: mutual assessment (MA) or self-assessment (SA). Most research hitherto has worked to bin a species into one of these categories. In this review, we discuss the limitations of this approach and provide solutions. We posit that assessment strategies do not need to be fixed within a species, individuals, or interactions, and that many organisms should adjust their assessment strategy as the environment, opponent, and opportunities for information gathering change. We show that assessment strategies are an individual-level characteristic, can vary within and between contests, and are not mutually exclusive. We argue that MA is the midpoint along a spectrum of self only and opponent only assessment. We discuss the effects of resource distribution, demographics, experience, information transfer, and ontogeny on assessment strategy evolution and behavior. We conclude by providing empirical guidelines and an example with a simulated dataset.
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