Australian Desert Goby
Wikipedia Creative Commons
The
benefits of striking the first blow are large if you’re small. There are many
reasons that males fight and this may be over food resources, or the love of
their lives – territory usually includes both of these drivers, but the
bigger, stronger individual most often are the ones to bet on. Interestingly,
though, small individuals often get aggressive very quickly.
Svensson
et al have been trying to make sense
of this in this week’s PLoS ONE with a study using Australian Desert Gobies
(1). These are pretty little fish where the males take care of the egg watching
duties while the females go off and mind their own business.
The
research team set up a goby with a nest to defend in their lab and then
hypothesized that there would be fights if the resident and other fish thought
that there were females to fight over, so they tempted the males with females
for a couple of days and then let intruders in near the nest.
Of
course, a fish has to do what a fish has to do and fights occurred. The degree
of aggression was not dependent on there being sexy females in the offing.
Consistently, when small males were given the nest to defend they went in hard
and very fast and were generally successful in scaring off the intruder before
he’d got himself organized.
Bigger
defenders were not in such a hurry to attack first and showed no signs of a
Napoleon Complex. Also there was no correlation with the size of the intruders.
The small guys just didn’t hang around to discuss things in a fishy way, they
knew the benefits of striking the first blow and went for it. In a long drawn
out brawl, they would have almost inevitably lost. But their in fast and hard
strategy worked.
Seems
to be a strategy that is well known across species, so no surprises down under
in the fishy lagoons.
