Citation

Dugatkin LA, Druen M. Proc. Biol. Sci. 2004; 271(Suppl 6): S488-9.

Affiliation

Department of Biology, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292, USA. lee.dugatkin@louisville.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Royal Society of London)

DOI

10.1098/rsbl.2004.0235

PMID

15801612

PMCID

PMC1810114

Abstract

Winner and loser effects have now been documented in a number of species. To our knowledge, experimental work, however, has focused exclusively on pairwise interactions, and not the extent to which winner and loser effects impact hierarchy formation. We report the results of experimentally manipulated winner and loser effects on hierarchy formation in a socially living species, the green swordtail, Xiphophorus helleri. Our results demonstrate that randomly chosen winners in pairwise aggressive contests were more likely to emerge as top-ranked individuals in a hierarchy, whereas randomly chosen losers were more likely to emerge as the lowest-ranking individuals, and that 'winner-neutral-loser' hierarchies were significantly overrepresented.

Language: en