The use of multiple sources of social information in contest behavior: testing the social cognitive abilities of a cichlid fish

摘要: Theory suggests that living in large social groups with dynamic interactions often favours the evolution of enhanced cognitive abilities. Studies how animals assess their own contest ability commonly focus on a single task, and little is known about diversity or co-occurrence abilities species. We examined highly cichlid fish Julidochromis transcriptus uses four major situations; direct experience, winner/loser effects, eavesdropping transitive inference (TI). conducted experiments which assessed status rivals after either physical contests observed contests. Individuals used information from previous encounter to re-establish dominance without additional contact, but effects were not observed. Social alone was ruled out, we found reasoning infer other individuals unknown status. Our results suggest stable hierarchical groups, estimations ability, based individual recognition pathways such as TI are more prevalent than effects. advanced might be widespread among fishes, have previously gone undetected.