Mate guarding - a male staying near a female for a while after mating - has traditionally been interpreted in the context of sexual conflict. New observations of wild field crickets suggest instead that guarding males provide protection from predators, enhancing female fitness.

When should males begin guarding a resource when both resources and guarders vary in quality? This general problem applies, for example, to migrant birds occupying territories in the spring and to precopula in crustaceans where males grab females before they molt and become receptive. Previous work has produced conflicting predictions. Theory on migrant birds predicts that the strongest competi...

A terrain is an x-monotone polygonal curve, i.e., successive vertices have increasing x-coordinates. Terrain Guarding can be seen as a special case of the famous art gallery problem where one has to place at most k guards on a terrain made of n vertices in order to fully see it. In 2010, King and Krohn showed that Terrain Guarding is NP-complete [SODA ’10, SIAM J. Comput. ’11] thereby solving a...

organization of living environment is possible through a clear definition of private and public arenas and determinationof a spatial hierarchy. such defined arenas increase the sense of belonging to the environment which personalizesresidential environments. enclosure is among the quantities that play a significant role in defining the spaces. in fact,enclosure is the factor that defines a spac...

The study analyzed the effects of self-recording and behavioral skills training on guarding responses of 3 staff members while they assisted 3 students with multiple disabilities to ambulate. The intervention increased the percentage of correct posture and guarding responses and the distance that students ambulated. These effects generalized when staff taught new students.

In many socially monogamous species, both sexes seek copulation outside the pair bond in order to increase their reproductive success. In response, males adopt counter-strategies to combat the risk of losing paternity. However, no study so far has tried to experimentally prove the function of behaviour for paternity assurance. Introducing a potential extra-pair partner during the female fertile...