Passage I

When two male crickets encounter each other there is either a fight or a threat display. The dominant cricket usually forces the submissive cricket to retreat to a place of safety. A biologist conducted two experiments to investigate the formation of dominance hierarchies (rankings) in male crickets. In the experiments described below, five adult male crickets were placed together in a container, and their interactions were observed and recorded.

Experiment 1

To determine what factors might affect the formation of dominance hierarchies, the biologist recorded the sequence in which the crickets were placed in the container, their masses, their adult ages, and the number of chirps each cricket made during the experiment. In addition, the crickets were ranked according to their aggressiveness toward each other, from most aggressive (1) to least aggressive (5). The results are shown in Table 1.

Experiment 2

The crickets were placed back into the container in the same sequence as in Experiment 1. The results of all aggressive encounters between pairs of crickets were recorded. A cricket was declared a "winner" if it forced the other cricket, the "loser," to retreat. Table 2 shows the results of the interactions between the crickets.

Table 3 summarizes the results of all the encounters for each cricket.

2. It was suggested that the more dominant a male cricket was, the more resources, such as food, that cricket would acquire. Accordingly, one would predict, based on win-loss records, that the cricket which would obtain the LEAST amount of food would be:

Answer and Explanation

Your Answer is

Correct Answer is J

Explanation

The premise given in the title is that the more dominant you can get, the more resources you can get, so the one that gets the least resources is the one that is the least dominant. Check table 3 and find that the one that wins the least is cricket E, so choose J.