Now listen to part of a lecture in a biology class.
I know some scientists who were observing snakes in the wild. And they witnessed an encounter of this sort between two rattlesnakes.
Uh...as you may know, rattlesnakes eat various kinds of small animals. Small animals that live underground, in burrows, in little holes in the ground. And what these scientists saw was these two rattlesnakes had found the same hole and both wanted to eat whatever food was in that hole.
So what happened was: The two rattlesnakes faced each other and then they lifted their bodies into an upright position and made themselves as tall as possible. And then they started pushing each other, kind of wrestling with one another, each snake trying to gain control of the other snake.
And what's interesting is that during all these pushing and shoving and maneuvering, neither snake ever tried to bite the other snake. Neither snake ever tried to injure the other snake. So...after this went on for a while, one of the snakes finally gained control of the other snake, pushed it to the ground and held it there. At this point, the snake that was on top could have easily bitten the other snake. But it didn't. Instead, it just released the other snake, just let it go. The snake that had lost just slithered away, and the snake that had won went down into the hole to look for food.
Explain how the example in the lecture illustrates agonistic behavior.
In the lecture, the professor mainly talked about the theory about agonistic behavior. To reinforce the theory, the professor gave an example about two rattlesnakes in his speech. In the example, scientists saw two rattlesnakes had found the same hole and both of them wanted to eat the food there. And what happened was the two rattlesnakes faced each other and made themselves as tall as possible. And then they began pushing each other and trying to control one another. But in this process, neither of those two rattlesnakes was trying to hurt each other. And the snake which could have easily bitten the other one, it didn’t, and let it go. Finally, the winner got the food. So this example justify the agonistic behavior which is the certain animals species just simply want to show off the power of themselves in the regard of territory or food and prove their strength in the competition.
