Social mates dynamically coordinate aggressive behavior to produce strategic territorial defense.

ABSTRACT: Negotiating social dynamics among allies and enemies is a complex problem that often requires individuals to tailor their behavioral approach to a specific situation based on environmental and/or social factors. One way to make these contextual adjustments is by arranging behavioral output into intentional patterns. Yet, few studies explore how behavioral patterns vary across a wide range of contexts, or how allies might interlace their behavior to produce a coordinated response. Here, we investigate the possibility that resident female and male downy woodpeckers guard their breeding territories from conspecific intruders by deploying defensive behavior in context-specific patterns. To study whether this is the case, we use correlation networks to reveal how suites of agonistic behavior ar

SUBMITTER: Moody NM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11785317 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature