Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on July 17, 2009
Behavioral Ecology 2009 20(5):930-935; doi:10.1093/beheco/arp071
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Food limitation increases aggression in juvenile meerkats
a Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK b Mammal Research Institute, Room 2–33 Zoology & Entomology, University of Pretoria, 0001 Pretoria, South Africa
Address correspondence to S.J. Hodge, who is now at Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, Tremough Campus, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 9EZ, UK. E-mail: s.j.hodge{at}exeter.ac.uk.
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Abstract |
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Both the rate and severity of sibling aggression are predicted to be higher when food availability is low. Although there is now good evidence that food availability influences sibling aggression in facultatively siblicidal species, where aggression commonly results in the death of a competitor, little is known about the proximate causes of aggression in nonsiblicidal species, where aggression rarely results in serious injury. Here, we investigated patterns of aggression between juvenile meerkats (Suricata suricatta), a species where littermate aggression is common, but never lethal. We show that the frequency of aggression between littermates increased when rainfall and helper number, both predictors of the amount of food available to pups, were low. Short-term feeding experiments demonstrated that reducing pup hunger by provisioning them before a foraging session significantly reduced their frequency of aggression in comparison to unfed controls. There was no evidence that offspring sex or weight influenced either the rate at which pups were aggressive, or which littermates they were aggressive to. These results suggest that food availability is an important factor affecting the severity of aggressive competition between offspring, even in the absence of lethal aggressive attacks.
Key words: aggression, agonism, competition, dominance, food amount hypothesis, siblicide, sibling rivalry, Suricata suricatta.
Received 8 October 2008; revised 9 March 2009; accepted 24 March 2009.