Tenants who don't pay the rent are a bane of landlords anywhere—just ask these fish
don’t pay the rent are a bane of landlords everywhere. And landlords who use heavy tactics to enforce payment are similarly a bane of tenants. Nor are these problems confined to human beings. Property-owning cichlid fish seem as ruthless about receiving what they are owed as any 19th-century tenement holder in the Lower East Side of New York., inhabit Lake Tanganyika in east Africa.
Though co-operative breeding by vertebrates has evolved several times , the question of how rental payments are enforced has never been definitively settled. The presumption is that dominants punish subordinate defaulters. But it is hard to prove, by observing wild animals, that this is what is happening.
What was needed to clear the point up was an experiment. And fish are easier to experiment on than mongooses or jays. Jan Naef and Michael Taborsky of the University of Bern, in Switzerland, therefore acquired 96 specimens ofand created menages of a pair of dominant landlords and a subordinate tenant in sand-bottomed aquaria.
Left alone, the fish behaved much as they would have done in the wild, with the tenant doing the grunt work of maintaining the hollows in the sand, and good relations pertaining between all. However, if a tenant was prevented for a time from fulfilling its duties, by trapping it behind a partition inserted into the aquarium for that purpose, things changed.
Whether similar treatment would be meted out for a failure to defend the landlords’ eggs has yet to be determined. When prevented by a partition from driving away predators, tenants were not subsequently on the receiving end of aggression from landlords—but since there were no eggs to defend at the time, that may not have been part of the contract. The predators in question, a species called, only to eggs and fry.
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