Behavioural differences across contexts may indicate morph-specific strategies in the lizard Ctenophorus decresii
Section snippets
Study Species
The tawny dragon lizard is a small, sexually dimorphic agamid lizard found on rocky outcrops of Kangaroo Island, Mt Lofty Ranges and the southern Flinders Ranges of South Australia (Houston, 1974, McLean et al., 2013). Males exhibit striking throat colour variation both within and between populations (Houston, 1998). In the Flinders Ranges, populations comprise discrete male colour morphs of orange, yellow, grey and orange-yellow coloration (Teasdale et al., 2013) whereas southern populations
Aggression
There was no difference in levels of aggression or attack response between years or due to the order that coloured models were presented (aggression level: year: F1, 28 = 0.06, P = 0.801; order: F4, 115 = 1.30, P = 0.274; attack response: year: F1, 28 = 0.03, P = 0.857; order: F4, 115 = 1.14, P = 0.343). There was no difference in perch temperature during model presentations between morphs (ANOVA: F3, 133 = 1.52, P = 0.213).
After stepwise model selection with aggression levels as the dependent variable, head width
Discussion
Our results show that tawny dragon colour morphs have different behavioural responses to both simulated conspecifics and predators. For aggression, the data best fitted a three-morph model (orange, yellow, grey) with orange-yellow individuals classified as yellow. The orange morph showed consistently high aggression and the grey morph consistently low aggression to all other morphs; in contrast, the aggression level of the yellow morph was conditional on the throat colour of the intruder with
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Rachael Bartlett, Enrique Cruz, Fran Lyndon-Gee, Sarah Grogan, Jessica Hacking, David Hamilton, Jenni Hetz, Molly Hunter, Claire McLean, Adnan Moussalli, Montse Sutulov, Tim Tan, Luisa Teasdale, Bryant Turffs and Peter Yewers for help in the field. We thank Associate Professor Graham Hepworth from the Statistical Consulting Centre at The University of Melbourne for statistical assistance. This work was supported by the Australia Research Council (DP1092908) to D.S–F., the
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