Spatiotemporal dynamics of animal contests arise from effective forces between contestants
Abstract
To obtain and defend resources, animals often participate in contests that involve complex trade-offs between risk and reward. Although it stands to reason to invoke cognitive decision-making schemes to analyze and model these contests, such cognitive schemes are hard to verify in behavioral experiments, and they do not address a directly observable aspect of contests–the motion of contestants in space. We study the dynamics of contests in an orb-weaving spider, where males compete for mating opportunities in the bounded arena of the female’s web. We show that physical rules of interaction, which amount to attraction and repulsion between the contestants and govern their motion, can account for the real-time dynamics of animal contests.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Dec 02, 2021
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.2106269118
Entities
People
- Alex Jordan
- Amir Haluts
- Dan Gorbonos
- Nir S. Gov
- Robert Ian Etheredge
- Sylvia F. Garza Reyes
Organizations
- Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
- Office of Naval Research
- University of Konstanz
- Weizmann Institute of Science