IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/beheco/v14y2003i4p576-582.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Forcible eviction and prevention of recruitment in the clown anemonefish

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Buston

Abstract

How big an animal group will be depends on how the group's size is regulated and on the costs and benefits of living in the group. To determine which individuals regulate group size of the clown anemonefish, Amphiprion percula, I investigated the strategies involved in the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of its groups. Groups composed of a single breeding pair and of zero to four nonbreeding subordinates occupied individual sea anemones (Heteractis magnifica), which provided the fish with oviposition sites and protection from predators. Group size increased linearly with anemone size. I used the residuals of this relationship as a measure of the degree of saturation of each anemone. Residents evicted low-rank subordinates and prevented the recruitment of additional subordinates at anemones with a high degree of saturation, but not at anemones with a low degree of saturation. These strategies indicate that residents control group membership of their subordinates, and suggest that residents might incur costs from the presence of subordinates in more saturated anemones. In general, whenever residents can control group membership, the prevention of recruitment and the eviction of subordinates will set an upper limit on group size. Copyright 2003.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Buston, 2003. "Forcible eviction and prevention of recruitment in the clown anemonefish," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 14(4), pages 576-582, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:14:y:2003:i:4:p:576-582
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arg036
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Akihisa Hattori, 2012. "Determinants of body size composition in limited shelter space: why are anemonefishes protandrous?," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 23(3), pages 512-520.
    2. Martin L Hing & O Selma Klanten & Mark Dowton & Kylie R Brown & Marian Y L Wong, 2018. "Repeated cyclone events reveal potential causes of sociality in coral-dwelling Gobiodon fishes," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(9), pages 1-22, September.
    3. Gokhale, Chaitanya S. & Hauert, Christoph, 2016. "Eco-evolutionary dynamics of social dilemmas," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 28-42.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:14:y:2003:i:4:p:576-582. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/beheco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.