A beetle’s back serves as a portable mating territory for pseudoscorpions

Evidence

It turns out that the back of a beetle makes a perfect mobile mating territory if you happen to be a pseudoscorpion, and males fight with one another to guard this resource. Males use their clawlike weapons in these fights and, as in the case with beetles, males with the biggest weapons win. These fights were understandably harder for the Zehs to observe, so they used a method of DNA fingerprinting to identify which male pseudoscorpions fathered the nymphs produced by riding females. They found that males with the largest weapons were the ones most likely to be on the backs of beetles. They also showed that not all beetle backs were equal. More females could ride on the largest beetles, and pseudoscorpion males with the largest weapons guarded these bigger beetles. A successful male may be able to mate with two dozen or more females before the beetle lands. Even better, once they land, the mated females hop off, and a new round of females hop on. — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 216

Categorization

• XREF: The mobile-territory concept generalizes beyond place-based defense and reappears in later discussions of transient resources; also a striking analogue to how human forces defend moving convoys or supply lines.
• SEED: A mobile territory — a living surface that is itself a scarce, defensible, high-value node — is a vivid image for an essay on how ‘place’ can be decoupled from ‘territory’ in both animal and human warfare.

Related

• Rare and defensible sap flows make male beetle territories worth fighting for (similarity 0.79)
• Rare localized resources translate fighting success into reproductive success (similarity 0.78)