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6. Territorial behavior.

thology use this term to describe a series of events by which a part of an animal or human population demarcates a part of its environment and gets, reciprocally, demarcated by it. This behavior by marking with some sign the part in question of the environment turns it into a territory, while those performing this behavior expose themselves to some marking that turns the part in question of the population a well-identified group. From that moment on that demarcated territory and this demarcated group are ordered to each other by the territorial behavior: the individuals thus marked cannot leave the territory they marked for more than a well defined distance and/or time period, and outsiders cannot approach it closer than a critical distance. If the latter do so, they provoke a fighting activity in those defending their territory.

As far as the territory is already demarcated by the group and the group by the territory, staying inside or outside the borderline of a territory and, similarly, belonging or not to a given group elicits categorically different disposition in an individual for a precise (e.g., fighting or mating) activity.

Such a change in being disposed or indisposed to perform a precise activity in accordance with the actual state of territorial organization is well demonstrated by the fighting behavior of the stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) preparing to mate. The power relations of fighting change according to whether the individual fish is inside or outside its own territory when involved in fighting. According to Konrad Lorenz's observations, the combativeness of a stickleback is in inverse relationship with the given distance between him and his nest; in his own nest, he is a fierce fighter, but the farther he swims away from his headquarter, the less he is motivated to attack. When two male stickleback meets, we can qite accurately predict the outcome of their fight: the fish that is farther from his nest is the one that will take flight, Lorenz claims, addig that near to his own nest even the smalest can dispose of the largest enemy.

One could (though traditionally does not) put it in Gibsonian terms and say that the territorial behavior intervenes in the distribution of affordances to the environment and in that of effectivities to the animal population. The key factor of such a redistribution is a marking activity, an imposition of signs upon a part of the environment transformed by this means into a territory and, parallelly, upon a part of the animal population transformed by this means into a group.

Signs when attached not to a part of an environment but to that of a population may the same way change the disposition of performing a precise activity as territorial signs do. E.g., male individuals of certain species mark by a particular biochemical substance the female during mating so as to indispose other males from mating with that female, even if impregnation was not effective. Likewise, the issue of a fighting may impose postural signs upon winners and loosers and the display of such a posture may determine a rather lasting hierarchical organization without being challenged by newer behavioral trials.

Thus, neither the group which effects the demarcation of a territory nor this territory which affords the demarcation of that group is prefabricated, both are produced by the territorial behavior. In my conception the direct product of affordances and effectivities would not be, as Gibsonians claim, activities but functional “super-superstructures” that do transcend individual organism.