International Journal of Comparative Psychology

We explored whether the opportunity to learn about the arrival of food, a scarce resource, might facilitate subordinates’ food-stealing attempts―and dominants’ strategies to prevent stealing―in two species, namely green anole lizards (Anolis carolinensis) and firemouth cichlid fish (Thorichthys meeki). Following establishment of a dominance hierarchy, each group was randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions, either a learning treatment in which a signal preceded the appearance of food, or a control treatment in which both signal and food appeared at randomly determined times. Dominants and subordinates of both species learned to anticipate food arrival using learned cues, which in turn changed their social dynamic. In anoles, learning enabled subordinates to steal food more effectively, and both dominants and subordinates to capture it more quickly. Alternatively, learning enabled dominant cichlids to protect their food more successfully by mounting a more aggressive defense. These results suggest that learning could play an important role in the competition for a scarce resource amongst many animals that form dominance hierarchies.