In species with time!limited opportunities for insemination\ precopulatory mate!guarding is expected to coevolve with the duration of female reproductive cycles[ Despite this adaptation to female characteristics\ it may also be advan! tageous for males to adjust the duration of guarding with respect to sex ratio because the bene_ts of guarding are dependent on the availability of females[ If fe...

A survey given to animal shelters across the US reported food bowl guarding as one of the most common reasons for euthanasia and only 34% attempted to modify this guarding behavior. This study identified 96 dogs that guarded their food bowl during an assessment, and then placed them into a home on a modification program. Food guarding behavior was identified as stiffening, gulping, growling, fr...

Many shelters euthanize or restrict adoptions for dogs that exhibit food guarding while in the animal shelter. However, previous research showed that only half the dogs exhibiting food guarding during an assessment food guard in the home. So, dogs are often misidentified as future food guarders during shelter assessments. We examined the impact of shelters omitting food guarding assessments. Ni...

In fiddler crabs both males and females defend territories that are essential for survival. Given pronounced sexual dimorphism in weaponry, how do weaponless females defend their territory from well-armed males? Using observational data and two simple experiments, we test whether male Uca annulipes protect their female neighbours from conspecific intruders. We show that males defend their femal...

The terrain guarding problem and art gallery problem are two areas in computational geometry. Different versions of terrain guarding involve guarding a discrete set of points or a continuous set of points on a terrain. The art gallery problem has versions including guarding an entire polygon by a set of discrete points at the vertices or any point inside the polygon itself. This paper will give...

Traditional interpretations of mating behaviors assume cooperation between the sexes. The field of sexual conflict provides a contrasting view: The sexes are commonly in conflict because they diverge in benefits/costs of reproduction. Precopulatory mate guarding, wherein males attempt to monopolize mates by physically pairing before fertilization, is one expected case of conflict. Initial guard...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.08.007 0003-3472/© 2014 The Association for the Study of A Mate guarding is one of the most common tactics in sperm competition. Males are expected to guard their mates when costs of guarding (accrued from physical confrontations with rivals and/or reduced foraging) are low relative to the benefits of ensuring mating opportunities and paternity. We inves...

This paper proposes an effective framework to compute the visibility guarding and star decomposition of 3D solid shapes. We propose a progressive integer linear programming algorithm to solve the guarding points that can visibility cover the entire shape; we also develop a constrained region growing scheme seeded on these guarding points to get the star decomposition. We demonstrate this guardi...