Exercise, Showing-off and Lizards: Part 1.
When you're trying to attract females, you want to show that you're a
good quality male in peak physical condition. To some lizards, this
means doing some good old-fashioned push-ups!
To communicate
their condition, male anole lizards bop their heads rhythmically and
display their colourful dewlaps (neck flaps). These gestures signal both
male and femal
e lizards - to the
females, they say "Look what good condition I'm in, come and mate with
me". However to the males, they say "You can't compete with me, back off
out of my territory", preventing an unnecessary fight. But what good
are these displays if no one is watching?
Terry Ord (University
of New South Wales) and his team noticed that these displays were
sometimes preceded by an intensive push-up display. To investigate the
reasons behind this, they designed an experiment using a
visually-convincing robotic lizard. The robot lizard was programmed to
bop its head after either push ups or dewlap extension. Both alerts got
the real lizard's attention, demonstrating they are used as an alert.
Analysis of 300 responses revealed that the lizards only used push-ups
when their target was visually distracted, or when there was other
visual "noise".
But why only use an effective signal
sometimes? Well, push-ups use a lot of energy and may attract predators -
if lizards were using them all the time, there's a good chance many
would be detected by their predators and quickly caught due to their
tired state.
These findings are an excellent demonstration of
lizards' ability to change their signalling behaviour in response to
less-than-ideal conditions. In the words of the authors, "Our results
show that Anolis lizards are able to evaluate environmental conditions
that affect the degradation of long-distance signals and adjust their
behavior accordingly."
Photo: Rock agama lizard, who also does push-ups. Credit to Bill Given.
If you want to read their paper, it is available here: http://bit.ly/TiZCHs
http://
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/
Exercise, Showing-off and Lizards: Part 1.
When you're trying to attract females, you want to show that you're a good quality male in peak physical condition. To some lizards, this means doing some good old-fashioned push-ups!
To communicate their condition, male anole lizards bop their heads rhythmically and display their colourful dewlaps (neck flaps). These gestures signal both male and femal
When you're trying to attract females, you want to show that you're a good quality male in peak physical condition. To some lizards, this means doing some good old-fashioned push-ups!
To communicate their condition, male anole lizards bop their heads rhythmically and display their colourful dewlaps (neck flaps). These gestures signal both male and femal
e lizards - to the
females, they say "Look what good condition I'm in, come and mate with
me". However to the males, they say "You can't compete with me, back off
out of my territory", preventing an unnecessary fight. But what good
are these displays if no one is watching?
Terry Ord (University of New South Wales) and his team noticed that these displays were sometimes preceded by an intensive push-up display. To investigate the reasons behind this, they designed an experiment using a visually-convincing robotic lizard. The robot lizard was programmed to bop its head after either push ups or dewlap extension. Both alerts got the real lizard's attention, demonstrating they are used as an alert. Analysis of 300 responses revealed that the lizards only used push-ups when their target was visually distracted, or when there was other visual "noise".
But why only use an effective signal sometimes? Well, push-ups use a lot of energy and may attract predators - if lizards were using them all the time, there's a good chance many would be detected by their predators and quickly caught due to their tired state.
These findings are an excellent demonstration of lizards' ability to change their signalling behaviour in response to less-than-ideal conditions. In the words of the authors, "Our results show that Anolis lizards are able to evaluate environmental conditions that affect the degradation of long-distance signals and adjust their behavior accordingly."
Photo: Rock agama lizard, who also does push-ups. Credit to Bill Given.
If you want to read their paper, it is available here: http://bit.ly/TiZCHs
http://
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/
Terry Ord (University of New South Wales) and his team noticed that these displays were sometimes preceded by an intensive push-up display. To investigate the reasons behind this, they designed an experiment using a visually-convincing robotic lizard. The robot lizard was programmed to bop its head after either push ups or dewlap extension. Both alerts got the real lizard's attention, demonstrating they are used as an alert. Analysis of 300 responses revealed that the lizards only used push-ups when their target was visually distracted, or when there was other visual "noise".
But why only use an effective signal sometimes? Well, push-ups use a lot of energy and may attract predators - if lizards were using them all the time, there's a good chance many would be detected by their predators and quickly caught due to their tired state.
These findings are an excellent demonstration of lizards' ability to change their signalling behaviour in response to less-than-ideal conditions. In the words of the authors, "Our results show that Anolis lizards are able to evaluate environmental conditions that affect the degradation of long-distance signals and adjust their behavior accordingly."
Photo: Rock agama lizard, who also does push-ups. Credit to Bill Given.
If you want to read their paper, it is available here: http://bit.ly/TiZCHs
http://
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/
No comments:
Post a Comment