A new study sheds light on how male wall lizards resolve territorial disputes, challenging the common perception of these reptiles as simple and ruthless creatures. The research explores the role of behavior, color, and size in determining the outcome of these contests, providing insights into the nuanced communication strategies employed by these animals.
Size and Color — Behavior is King
But the study from researchers at the University of Valencia, the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station in France, and the University of Turku in Finland has some surprising results.
Competing males are less likely to react aggressively to attack rivals of the same colour variation, meaning that while dark male wall lizards are more aggressive and will almost always beat light males in a territorial contest, they don’t seem able to monopolize the mating market simply by looking fierce. On the other hand, the behavior of the lizards has a lot to do with who wins these encounters.
Male displays range from hunches and throat architectures to foot shakes, communication readiness to fight or concede with female chimpanzees. It seems that these dynamic signals are better for settling conflicts than sharing fixed traits like color and size. Citing an earlier study, the researchers suggest that such displays probably enable the lizards to determine aggression in fellow males and avoid the costs of physical confrontations.
They would become Architecture of Lizard Social Communication
These results oppose the stereotype of lizards as simplistic slayers. Instead, the researchers discovered that these creatures have a rich array of social signals that allow them to navigate their intricate social hierarchy.
Throughout the day, lizards fill in both as resident and trespasser. Yet this research provides evidence for a sophisticated comprehension of the interpersonal situations in which such social dynamics occur, and demonstrates that these individuals engage in behaviors that send targeted signals of their aggressive intentions while minimizing escalation.
For instance, they discovered that high-body behaviours are threat related and lower-body behaviours are appeasement behaviours. They found that lizards using the raised-body displays were more likely to both win a contest and chase off their opponent, while those using foot shakes more often lost but did also reduce their risk of something worse, such as being bitten or chased.
Such a sophisticated level of behavior contrasts with the general perception that lizards are simple creatures and indicates that their social life may be also far more complex than one might initially think. The hope is that the results of this study will help shift paradigms and encourage new areas of investigation aimed at understanding the nature of these complex social communication strategies.
Conclusion
The results of a long-term study on the territorial battles between male wall lizards show what role color and size play in these interactions, with numbers suggesting that such combats have been greatly overstated, scarcely taking place at all; instead they seem to be driven mostly by behavior. Together, the results demonstrate the fiendishly cunning social strategies at play in the social lives of these reptiles, and how their richly textured society works. He noted that this research was thus furthering our fundamental biological cognition on the behavior of lizards as well also having a wider variety from the study of animal social dynamics, and signalling.
