Siamese Fighting Fish Lab Report

Rate and duration of aggressive displays determine winners and losers of a dyadic conflict between male Siamese fighting fish, Betta splendens.

Introduction
In a biotic environment, agonistic behaviour is most common amongst species, because accessing resources, territories or mating possibilities lead to intraspecific competition, which is dominated by three behaviours: threat, aggression and submission. Fights are pursued predominantly to claim a territory so that other animals are denied access to a habitat or a resource. This is also known as territorial behaviour. Animals try to demonstrate their superiority before physical fights through aggressive displays which are highly stereotypic and specific to each species (McGlone JJ. 1986).
In addition, they swam to the top of the tank and back down. The use of their ventral, caudal and dorsal fins seemed very limited, as opposed to the use of their pectoral and pelvic fins during movement at rest.
In order to pay attention to the aggressive displays of Siamese fighting fish, their attention was caught by using a mirror which was held against the glass. The facing and broadside displays were then seen through the opening of the gills, the extension of the bronchiostable membrane and the erection of the large fins which remained unused during periods of rest.
During the first part of the experiment the opaque barrier was not removed, meaning that the two fish could not see each other. A mirror was placed on the side of the tank so that the fish in the right side of the tank could see its own reflection, and the aggressive display activity was monitored during 5 minutes. A stopwatch was used by one student to calculate the cumulative duration of facial displays and a tally counter was used by the other student to count the rate of facial displays the fish performed against their mirror image per minute. The same experiment was executed on the fish in the left side of the tank. The aim of this first experiment was to detect the number of facial displays and their
However, when the p-value is compared with the 0.05 significance level, it is obvious that the difference in p-values of the durations is more significant than the significance level of the rates. In addition, the results indicate that only 0.3% of the results are due to chance alone for the duration of the facing display, whereas there is 2.5% probability that the rates of facing display are due to chance alone. This clearly shows that duration of facial displays has a larger impact than the rate on the outcome of the