Dominance between booby nestlings involves winner and loser effects

Abstract

Two-chick broods of the blue-footed booby, Sula nebouxii, ordinarily exhibit stable dominance-subordinance, with the senior (first-hatched) chick habitually aggressive and the junior one habitually submissive (Nelson 1978, The Sulidae: Gannets and Boobies. London: Oxford University Press). But are both the subordinate and the dominant chick affected in their agonistic tendencies by early social experience? To answer this, we permanently paired subordinate and dominant chicks, 2-3 weeks old, with singletons (chicks lacking experience with a nestmate) by cross-fostering. During the first 4 h after pairing, subordinate chicks were seven times less aggressive than singletons and twice as likely to be submissive; dominant chicks were six times as aggressive as singletons. Although most subordinates consistently lost agonistic encounters during the first 10 days after pairing, the proportion of dominants that won decreased progressively until, by day 6, only about half of dominant chicks were winning. Early social experience has a strong but reversable training effect on both subordinates and dominants. Training as a subordinate showed more persistent effects than training as a dominant, possibly in part because our testing situation perpetuated subordinate training and counteracted dominant training. Copyright 1998 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Copyright 1998 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.