This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In a study of monk parakeets, researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Duke University found that sex has little to no impact on who initiates fights, who is targeted or who rises in the dominance hierarchy. The work, led by undergraduate researcher Yuchen Chen with co-authors Sara Lipshutz of Duke and UC associate professor Elizabeth Hobson, was published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology.
The study stemmed from overlapping interests within the research team in how sex can shape species' characteristics and behaviors, as well as the importance of aggression and hierarchies within groups. Female and male parakeets look identical. "Because we can't tell a female monk parakeet from a male based on their appearance, I started wondering about the effect of sex on their behavior, particularly aggression and dominance," Chen said.
"In a lot of animals, you see differences in aggression and how hierarchies form between females and males. But our new results show that we don't observe any major differences between female and male aggression or rank in our parakeet groups," Hobson said. In her lab in UC's Department of Biological Sciences, Hobson studies animal sociality and cognition.
She has been working with monk parakeets for 20 years. One thing monk parakeets love to do is squabble. They spend much of the day exerting dominance over others in behaviors such as taking over another's perch.
"In the parakeet groups, the birds fight a lot, which gives us a lot of data to analyze, but these fights are usually minor squabbles, and it's extremely rare for them to injure each other," Hobson said. These frequent squabbles could be a way the parakeets resolve social differences. "Many previous studies have studied aggression and dominance in a sex-specific manner or only in one sex.
Since we observed all the parakeets interacting, we decided to examine both aggression between individuals of the same sex and between individuals of opposite sexes," Chen said. "Group living involves frequent interactions among individuals. Low-stakes squabbles can build a social hierarchy that prevents more intense, dangerous fights," Lipshutz said.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
