Self-handicapping in object play: how belugas (<i>Delphinapterus leucas</i>) make play difficult

Ham, Jackson R.; Lilley, Malin K.; Miller, Malin R.; Leca, Jean‐Baptiste; Hill, Henry

doi:10.1080/21594937.2022.2152535

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Moreover, the play fighting of some species can involve competing for all three (Pellis and Pellis, 2018). The same also appears to be the case for some cetaceans, which can compete for a sexual advantage or an agonistic advantage (Lilley et al, 2020;Ham et al, 2022;Ham et al, 2023b;Ham et al, 2023c). For play involving sexual contacts, it is those cases in which the recipient defends itself that look strikingly like play fighting and so resembles serious fighting.…”

Section: The Design Features Of Play Fightingmentioning

confidence: 87%

Play fighting revisited: its design features and how they shape our understanding of its mechanisms and functions

Pellis,

Ham

2024

Front. Ethol.

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Play fighting has been one of the most intensely studied forms of play and so has provided some of our deepest insights into the understanding of play in general. As the label implies, this behavior resembles serious fighting, in that the animals compete for an advantage over one another, but unlike true aggression, for play fighting to remain playful, it also incorporates a degree of cooperation and reciprocity – restrained competition seems to be its hallmark. Despite these common features, it should be noted that both the advantage competed over and the mechanisms by which restraint is achieved varies across species. Such variation mitigates simple generalities. For example, how empirical support for a proposed adaptive function in one species not being replicated in another, is to be interpreted. What has emerged over the past few decades is that play fighting is diverse, varying across several dimensions, some superficial, some fundamental, making choosing species to compare a challenge. In this paper, we explore various design features that constitute play fighting and the ways these can be modified across different species and lineages of species. Given that a major pillar of ethology is that description precedes explanation, having a good grasp of the behavioral diversity of play fighting is an essential starting point for detailed analyses of the mechanisms and functions of play. We show that commonalities across species likely involve different mechanisms than do species idiosyncrasies, and that different styles of play fighting likely afford different adaptive opportunities.

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