Many animals fight to win resources, repel competitors or establish dominance in a social group. Mutualassessment of fighting ability, where competitors gather and compare information about their opponent’s as well as their own fighting ability has been the dominant theoretical framework for understanding decision-making during fights. However, self-assessment, where each individual has a cost ...

Abstract Social and aggressive behaviours often affect the fitness of multiple interacting individuals simultaneously. Here, we assessed dyadic interactions in a colour-polymorphic cichlid fish, red devil, Amphilophus labiatus. We found that sub-adult devil pairs smaller body size interacted more, were more towards each other, than comprising larger individuals. Interactions did not significant...

The goals of this paper were to investigate phylogenetic and evolutionary patterns of cichlid fish from West Africa and their Cichlidogyrus and Scutogyrus monogenean parasites, to uncover the presence of host-parasite cospeciation and to assess the level of morphological adaptation in parasites. This required the following steps, each one representing specific objectives of this paper: (1) to b...

The distinct behaviours of animals and the varied habitats in which animals live place different requirements on their visual systems. A trade-off exists between resolution and sensitivity, with these properties varying across the retina. Spectral sensitivity, which affects both achromatic and chromatic (colour) vision, also varies across the retina, though the function of this inhomogeneity is...

The ∼ 500 species of the cichlid fish species flock of Lake Victoria, East Africa, have evolved in a record-setting 100 000 years and represent one of the largest adaptive radiations. We examined the population structure of the endangered cichlid species Xystichromis phytophagus from Lake Kanyaboli, a satellite lake to Lake Victoria in the Kenyan Yala wetlands. Two sets of molecular markers wer...