Fighting scars: heavier gladiator frogs bear more injuries than lighter frogs
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Fighting scars: heavier gladiator frogs bear more injuries than lighter frogs Aline Candaten 1 & Angélica Gabriela Possenti 1 & Álvaro Augusto Mainardi 2 & Marcelo Carvalho da Rocha 2 & Alexandre V. Palaoro 3 Received: 1 October 2019 / Revised: 4 December 2019 / Accepted: 27 December 2019 # ISPA, CRL 2020
Abstract Animal contests are energetically costly, but injuries are said to be rare. In gladiator frogs, the males possess a spine beneath their pollex (i.e., prepollex) that can be used as weapons and frequently leave scars during contests over spawning areas. Knowing how scars are made, and how scars are distributed among individuals, might prove valuable to address the costs and benefits of fighting. Here, we studied the gladiator frog Boana curupi in a Neotropical stream to (1) assess the rarity of the contested resource, (2) assess how spines are used during contests, and (3) test how the quantity of scars on males’ backs correlate to their morphology. We found only four spawning areas in ~ 1 km of stream. And when males engaged in physical fights, they stroke the rival on their backs with the prepollex. Scars on males’ back are thus caused by the prepollex. Both results explain the high frequency of injuries: 90.7% (29 of 32 males) presented scars. Furthermore, the amount of injuries on a male’s back increased with the weight of the male, but not its body size. Therefore, heavier individuals are sustaining more injuries than lighter individuals, hinting that heavier individuals fight more frequently and value reproduction more than lighter individuals. Keywords Animal contests . Animal weapons . Damage . Lethal weapons . Amphibian contest
Introduction Contests over scarce resources generally increase the fitness of the winner of the interaction (Hardy and Briffa 2013). Given the link between contests and fitness, it is not surprising that some animals engage in intense contests, where injuries, and more rarely death, can occur (Kokko 2013). Unexpectedly, however, contest-related injuries are not as common as we Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-019-00333-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Alexandre V. Palaoro [email protected] 1
Universidade Regional Integrada do Alto Uruguai e das Missões – Campus de Frederico Westphalen, Frederico Westphalen, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
2
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Biodiversidade Animal, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Brazil
3
LUTA do Departamento de Ecologia e Evolução, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Rua Artur Riedel, 275, Eldorado, Diadema, São Paulo CEP 09972-270, Brazil
might think. The most common injuries, such as broken bones, broken antlers, and broken horns, are typically a result of the action of the individual itself, e.g., pushing too hard (i.e., self-inflicted injuries, Lane and Briffa 2017). But, injuries inflicted by rivals, or rival-inflicted injuries, although rarer than self-inflicted i
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