Territorial defence in a network: audiences only matter to male crabs primed for confrontation

Territorial contests often occur in the presence of conspecifics not directly involved in the interaction. Actors may alter their behaviour in the presence of this audience, an ‘audience effect’, and audiences themselves may alter their behaviour as a result of observing an interaction, a ‘bystander effect’. Previous work has documented these effects by looking at each in isolation, but to our knowledge, none has investigated their interaction; something that is more likely to represent a realistic scenario for species where individuals aggregate spatially. We therefore have a somewhat limited understanding of the extent and direction of these potentially complex indirect social effects on behaviour. Here we examined how audience and bystander effects work in tandem to modify resident male aggressive behaviour towards intruders in European fiddler crabs, Afruca tangeri. We found that male crabs with an audience showed greater aggressive behaviour towards an intruder compared to males wi...