The play was a fillip, not a filibuster, with the evening's main event remaining Jonny Gomes's three-run homer in the top of the sixth, which broke a 1 1 tie, and held up, guaranteeing that the teams, no matter who wins tonight, will return to Boston on Wednesday, for a sixth and then possibly a seventh and determining contest.
Despite the importance of experience in determining contest outcomes, patterns of selection did not change between rounds.
Further work is needed to investigate the factors that stimulate aggressive behaviour and determine contest resolution in E. nassaui, preferably with larger sample sizes than were possible in this study.
We measured several morphological traits, chosen for their importance in determining contest success in other lizards [31], [32]: body size (snout-vent length, SVL, to the nearest 0.1 mm), head depth (deepest point of head, in line with tympanum), jaw length (angle of the jaw to the tip of the snout) and body mass.
Male size (relative to his opponent) was overwhelmingly the most important factor determining contest outcome.
We find that male size relative to his opponent is far more important in determining contest outcome than any effects of age or social experience.
As residual reproductive value is likely to influence contest behavior via effects on motivation rather than fighting ability, these studies provide further, albeit indirect, evidence that age effects on contest behavior that result from variation in residual reproductive value may be weak when fighting ability plays a prominent role in determining contest outcome.
Thus, if winner and loser effects are produced by changes in perceived relative competitive status within the population, other social experiences should also play a role in determining contest behavior, particularly in species where contest behavior is costly and where other cues to assess fighting ability exist, as may be the case when morphology correlates strongly with fighting ability.
Further studies investigating how experience alters subsequent contest behavior in the absence of potentially confounding physiological effects of winning and losing are needed to test whether self-perception of fighting ability has a general role to play in determining contest behavior.
Literature is not like a sport, in which rank can be determined by contest, nor is it an entity that can be weighed or measured like a handsome squash or a blue-ribbon pig.
