Data from: Territorial defence in a network: audiences only matter to male crabs primed for confrontation

Territorial contests often occur in the presence of conspecifics not directly involved in the interaction. Actors may alter their behaviour in the presence of this audience, an ‘audience effect’, and audiences themselves may alter their behaviour as a result of observing an interaction, a ‘bystander effect’. Previous work has documented these effects by looking at each in isolation, but to our knowledge, none has investigated their interaction; something that is more likely to represent a realistic scenario for species where individuals aggregate spatially. We therefore have a somewhat limited understanding of the extent and direction of these potentially complex indirect social effects on behaviour. Here we examined how audience and bystander effects work in tandem to modify resident male aggressive behaviour towards intruders in European fiddler crabs, Afruca tangeri. We found that male crabs with an audience showed greater aggressive behaviour towards an intruder compared to males without an audience, but only if they had acted as a bystander to an aggressive signalling interaction prior to the intrusion. Indeed, bystanding during aggressive interactions elevated aggressive responses to intruders maximally if there was an audience present. Our results suggest that bystanding had a priming effect on territory-holding males, potentially by providing information on the immediate level of competition in the local neighbourhood, and that same-sex audiences only matter if males have been primed. This study highlights the fundamental importance of considering broader interaction networks in studying real-world dyadic interactions and of including non-vertebrate taxonomic groups in these studies

Between speaking out in public and being person-centred: collaboratively designing an inclusive archive of learning disability history

The Living Archive of Learning Disability History is being developed by an inclusive team of researchers both with and without learning disabilities. We argue the archive is important in making publicly visible the lives of people with learning disabilities. Yet – drawing on thinking that came out of our collaborative workshops – we also identify alternative imperatives, that you might want to have control over how you share your personal memories and stories, with whom, when you share them and for how long. We show how we are responding to these different ideas in the design of the Living Archive in order to create pathways between two traditions that have emerged through self-advocacy: ‘speaking out in public’ and ‘being person-centred’. We outline our research on consent processes to ensure that our archive builds capacity for as many people as possible to consent while also offering a legally compliant ‘Best Interests’ process in line with the requirements of the Mental Capacity Act, England and Wales (2005). We argue that deploying and actively navigating between the different political logics of ‘speaking out in public’ and ‘being person-centred’ offers a way forward for ongoing debates concerning community engagement in archives, museums and heritage

Stochastic and deterministic processes interact in the assembly of desert microbial communities on a global scale

Extreme arid regions in the worlds' major deserts are typified by quartz pavement terrain. Cryptic hypolithic communities colonize the ventral surface of quartz rocks and this habitat is characterized by a relative lack of environmental and trophic complexity. Combined with readily identifiable major environmental stressors this provides a tractable model system for determining the relative role of stochastic and deterministic drivers in community assembly. Through analyzing an original, worldwide data set of 16S rRNA-gene defined bacterial communities from the most extreme deserts on the Earth, we show that functional assemblages within the communities were subject to different assembly influences. Null models applied to the photosynthetic assemblage revealed that stochastic processes exerted most effect on the assemblage, although the level of community dissimilarity varied between continents in a manner not always consistent with neutral models. The heterotrophic assemblages displayed signatures of niche processes across four continents, whereas in other cases they conformed to neutral predictions. Importantly, for continents where neutrality was either rejected or accepted, assembly drivers differed between the two functional groups. This study demonstrates that multi-trophic microbial systems may not be fully described by a single set of niche or neutral assembly rules and that stochasticity is likely a major determinant of such systems, with significant variation in the influence of these determinants on a global scale. © 2011 International Society for Microbial Ecology All rights reserved.link_to_OA_fulltex