Fig. 2

C57 and wild-derived male mice establish territories rather than dominance hierarchies. A Males generally visited only one or two zones, and no males visited all zones, as shown by representative space use data from three C57 and three WD males (rows, as indicated by three letter individual identification codes). Each 2 × 4 grid shows the eight resource zones on each of the 10 days (columns) of a trial, with warmer colors indicating a high concentration of RFID reads in a given zone. B WD males form territories more rapidly than C57 males. Here, the y-axis represents the percent male-sourced RFID reads per zone from the focal zone’s most present male, with values of 100% indicating complete monopolization. C Male-male dyadic spatiotemporal association bout events were shorter, less frequent, and deteriorated more quickly in WD mice compared to C57 mice. D To quantify territoriality, we calculated a priority access score, a cumulative metric of resource zone access across the 10 days of the trial. For both WD and C57 males, this territory metric deviated from unimodality, indicating a group of males that had consistent access to resource zones (territory holders) and those without (non-territorial). Here, scores near or greater than +10 indicate a male that controlled a resource zone for the duration of the trial. Negative scores are indicative of males that failed to capture a territory. E Consistent with territoriality, but not a dominance hierarchy, territory-holding males were much more likely to win a spatial dispute with another male, defined as displacing the other male, when the dispute occurred in their home territory as opposed to in a different male’s territory. F Territorial control (as categorized by having a day 10 PAS > 0) conferred benefits in the form of increased access to females. This benefit of territoriality was stronger among WD as compared to C57 males (notice that WD males without a territory essentially never spend any time with females, dashed blue line). Data are plotted as means ± SEM