Animals must gather information from a fluctuating environment to reduce uncertainty and make decisions directly tied to survival and reproduction. Gathering information from the environment and other organisms can reduce the risk of predation, facilitate habitat choice, and dictate persistence in contests over resources. The use of signals (stimuli benefiting the sender and receiver due to evolutionary pressures on both) as well as social cues (stimuli benefiting a receiver due to evolutionary pressures on the receiver to pay heed to the information) is an integral component of direct contact with a conspecific. Engaging in a contest involves a trade-off in which one uses time and energy to gather information about one’s opponent or applies the bulk of that time and energy to contest persistence. Information gathering about one’s surroundings, oneself, or possibly an opponent during contests is necessary to reduce costs such as death or injury, and the way in which the decision to retreat is reached is known as an assessment strategy. Due to differential energy constraints on males and females, one can hypothesize that the sexes may invest different amounts of energy to fighting and gathering information. Unfortunately, data on female intrasexual and intersexual contests and assessment are lacking. The focus of this research resides in the manipulation of information availability, specifically chemical stimuli, to further elucidate mechanisms of assessment and how they might differ for males and females . I have chosen to use crayfish as the organism of focus due to their repeated establishment as models for agonistic behavior and their significant reliance on a particular information pathway, chemical communication. We hypothesize that males and females will differ in the frequency and duration of the chemical signal released during contests and that frequency and duration will also be context dependent (e.g. same-sex vs mixed-sex contests).