IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/beheco/v24y2013i4p846-852..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Species recognition of color and motion signals in Anolis grahami: evidence from responses to lizard robots

Author

Listed:
  • Joseph M. Macedonia
  • David L. Clark
  • Raymond G. Riley
  • Darrell J. Kemp

Abstract

Male Anolis lizards exhibit an impressive diversity of dewlap color patterns and motion displays. These traits are thought to mediate species recognition, but direct experimental support is limited. It is also unclear if and how color and display behavior each may contribute to the signaling of species identity. We used a programmable robotic lizard to manipulate these signal components independently in Anolis grahami. Four robot variants were used: a control treatment that displayed the conspecific (orange) dewlap color and headbobbing sequence, 2 treatments that differed from the control only in dewlap coloration (light or dark blue), and a fourth treatment that differed from the control only in headbob display pattern (reversed headbob display structure). Artificial dewlaps were calibrated in color and brightness to the A. grahami visual system using a computational model. We presented robots to 102 adult male subjects and quantified their responses for durations of dewlap pulsing and headbob displays. Subjects spent significantly more time pulsing their dewlaps in response to control (conspecific) robot displays than to treatments that deviated from the control either in dewlap color or in headbob display structure. Our findings implicate both morphology and behavior as functional components of social signaling in A. grahami, thus underscoring the complex, multicomponent nature of anoline displays.

Suggested Citation

  • Joseph M. Macedonia & David L. Clark & Raymond G. Riley & Darrell J. Kemp, 2013. "Species recognition of color and motion signals in Anolis grahami: evidence from responses to lizard robots," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 24(4), pages 846-852.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:24:y:2013:i:4:p:846-852.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/art027
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:beheco:v:24:y:2013:i:4:p:846-852.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/beheco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.