This doesn’t even necessarily need cat-level intelligence. Cicada-killer wasps will adopt effectively arbitrary landmarks set out by humans as territorial markers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347299911338 . Here, it lowered fighting as much as 80%.
A more readable version perhaps: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/the-cicada-killers-are-coming/277688/
Sorry about all the paywalls. Of course you could argue that in the case of wasps there might be a hard-coded instinct to find a random line in the sand (so to speak) and use it as a territory definition.
This doesn’t even necessarily need cat-level intelligence. Cicada-killer wasps will adopt effectively arbitrary landmarks set out by humans as territorial markers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347299911338 . Here, it lowered fighting as much as 80%.
A more readable version perhaps: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/the-cicada-killers-are-coming/277688/
Sorry about all the paywalls. Of course you could argue that in the case of wasps there might be a hard-coded instinct to find a random line in the sand (so to speak) and use it as a territory definition.