IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/beheco/v18y2007i1p53-61.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Short-term behavioral consequences of territory relocation in a Caribbean damselfish, Stegastes diencaeus

Author

Listed:
  • Peter T. McDougall
  • Donald L. Kramer

Abstract

Home-range relocation occurs during natal and breeding dispersal, ontogenetic habitat shifts, and the maintenance of resource- or density-dependent patterns of distribution. Relocating animals are expected to change their behavior to compensate for limited familiarity with the new home range and with neighboring conspecifics; such changes may indicate some of the costs of relocation. Little is known, however, about the magnitude and duration of the changes or about the types of behavior affected. We investigated the short-term (2 day) behavioral changes associated with relocation in the highly territorial longfin damselfish, Stegastes diencaeus. We compared the behavior of newcomers settling into experimentally created vacancies in an established neighborhood with that of the original residents of the same territories. The greatest difference was an increase in the rate of agonistic interactions. Newcomers also used smaller territories, moved more, and fed less. Neighboring damselfishes were less aggressive toward neighbors that expanded into vacant territories than toward "strangers" that relocated from elsewhere. The behavior of newcomers approached that of original residents within 2 days but territory size did not. These observations suggest that relocating a territory increases energy expenditure and decreases energy intake. Such costs could explain the philopatry of reef fish when alternative locations are of uncertain quality or are only slightly better. Nevertheless, they are unlikely to outweigh the long-term benefits of obtaining a superior territory--especially for individuals from adjacent territories. Copyright 2007.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter T. McDougall & Donald L. Kramer, 2007. "Short-term behavioral consequences of territory relocation in a Caribbean damselfish, Stegastes diencaeus," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 18(1), pages 53-61, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:18:y:2007:i:1:p:53-61
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arl055
    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. Ada M. Grabowska-Zhang & Teddy A. Wilkin & Ben C. Sheldon, 2012. "Effects of neighbor familiarity on reproductive success in the great tit (Parus major)," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 23(2), pages 322-333.

    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:18:y:2007:i:1:p:53-61. 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.