@Finn dAbuzz,
Quote:While fights-to-the-death between lobsters are rare, they do exhibit a progressive sequence of display behaviors, which, if an opponent refuses to withdraw, can escalate into a full-blown attack where antennae, claws, legs, or even eyestalks can be ripped off. These fights have extremely interesting consequences for the combatants. Laboratory-staged fights between evenly sized juvenile lobsters have demonstrated that the winner of a fight is truly a winner and the loser is a true loser. If a previously-fought lobster is then placed into another staged fight, its behavior is dependent upon its status from the previous fight. In other words, previous losers lose or refuse to fight with a new opponent. In the case where losers are pitted against other losers, no displays or fights occur. Winners again win, unless they are pitted against another winner - - in that case, the fights escalate and the lobsters cause extensive damage to each other. Usually the dominant or subordinate status only lasts until the animal molts. Then, if a subordinate molts first, survives, and becomes larger than the dominant, it will often become the new dominant animal.
It is currently believed that these seemingly long-term changes in status and behavior are determined by the level of two hormones known as serotonin and octopamine. Winners have higher blood levels of serotonin, while losers have higher levels of octopamine. If a lobster who has previously lost a fight is injected with serotonin, it becomes extremely belligerent and will attack lobsters much larger than itself. Even after being severely damaged (having claws and legs ripped from their joints), these serotonin-injected lobsters will still continue to fight. Studies such as these imply that aggressive behavior may have a hormonal component, and the lobster is currently being used as a model to better understand human aggression.
http://www.lobsters.org/tlcbio/biology1.html
Well, we know modern lobsters are territorial, and we probably can assume they have been so for
quite some time We also know that fossils, from over 100 million years ago, that look a whole lot like modern lobsters strongly suggest that they haven't changed much (I doubt anyone looked at what might be a lobster antenna and said "But it could be for wifi")
We have plenty of modern species that we believe haven't changed, physically, for a great, great many years: Crocodiles and sharks being just two.
Now a fossil can't definitively reveal the social behavior of the creature fossilized, and no one around today observed lobsters in the wild 150 million years ago, but the question is: Which is more plausable? That lobsters from 100 million years ago +, that very much resemble modern lobsters, displayed the same social behaviors that are obviously advantageous to
modern lobsters, or that way back then, earth was a hippie's Garden of Eden, until somehow, the Koch Bros went back in time, fucked the whole thing up, and created a world where evolution favored socialy hierarchies and dominance agression?
Whatever and whenever those bastards did their foul deed it obviously prompted an incredibly radical change in species advantage because we see social hierarchy in the vast majority (if not all) of social species, and dominance aggression in a ton that are not. (Here's a clue on timing - it was long before apes walked on two feet)
Maybe the Bonobos with their reliance on copulation defeated the evil Kochs, but not so the rest of the natural world.
Even if you were to believe the Koch Bros fiction, at the very least, social hierarchies and dominance aggression have been a successful evolutionary adaption for 10 million years.
How can I say this? Because
we are convinced that animal weaponry (particularly in mammals) is as much (if not more) for purposes of reproductive dominance as it is for defense.
Moose use their huge racks a hell of a lot more on each other than on bears, and the bears still get them.
I suppose we can quibble about the signifcance of 10 million, 50 million or 150 million years, but my point will remain essentially irrefutable: Social hierarchies, and dominance aggression have been great advantages to species for a
very, very long time.
