Elizabeth Preston from Discovermagazine.com wrote a great article about our paper on mate familiarity effects in the long-term monogamous sleepy lizard.
“Lizards in Long-Term Relationships Can Skip the Foreplay“
Great article. My favourite line “While the new couples are still engaged in preliminaries, the old couples are getting down to business.”
“Hot off the press”
Australian sleepy lizards (Tiliqua rugosa) are monogamous and form very strong pair bonds with their partner. In our latest study we investigated why sleepy lizards form those strong bonds, instead of mating with different partners every year.
We used a 31-year data set to investigate pair durations and rates of partner change. Many pairs stayed together for more than 10 years; and measured over a 5-year period, rates of partner change were below 34%.
In one year, we equipped 14 pairs with GPS data loggers and recorded detailed movement pattern of each lizard, to determine interaction frequencies between pair partners. Lizards of seven of those pairs had been together before and were familiar with each other, the other seven were not. We found that familiarity plays a role in pairing behaviour and that familiar pairs mated significantly earlier than non-familiar pairs. Early mating often equates to higher reproductive success, and we inferred that is the case in sleepy lizards. We suggest that this provides some evidence for the mate familiarity hypothesis in this lizard species. Read all the details here.
Tiliqua rugosa. Mate familiarity affects pairing behaviour.
Familiar pair partners mate earlier than unfamiliar partners.
A/Prof. Martin Whiting from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia is looking for two enthusiastic PhD students to work on two very interesting lizard projects.
This is a great opportunity to do a PhD in the awesome Sydney Lizard Lab embedded in the vibrant environment of Macquarie University and its Department of Biological Sciences.
*** Highly recommended – Go check it out ***
“Uncovering the evolution of intelligence is one of science’s greatest challenges. Social intelligence theory suggests that sociality selects for increasingly sophisticated cognition, but …..” (read more).
“The overarching aim of the project is to study adaptive co-variation across and between lizard colour patterns/signals in relation to socio-ecological factors (e.g. mating system, environmental conditions) and individual traits (e.g. age, sex, size, competitive ability, health or social status), and …..” (read more)
The Australian Geographic Society writes about on their blog.
Some more details about the project:
Long term monogamy in the sleepy lizard, Tiliqua rugosa.
Males and females usually have different reproductive interests resulting in sexual conflict. Hence, monogamy, the mating of one male with one female, is very intriguing and is often selected for by the necessity of bi-parental care.
Monogamy is most common in birds but very rare in lizards, with the sleepy lizard probably one of the best studied species. Furthermore, sleepy lizards are not only monogamous within one mating season but remain with the same partner for many years, often decades. Interestingly overt parental care is absent in this species. This provides a great research opportunity and may improve our understanding of monogamy.
I am, in collaboration with some colleagues, currently investigating the long-term monogamy in the sleepy lizard in a project that is supported by the Australian Geographic Society. The main question our work revolves around is whether pairs that have been together for many years differ in their pair bond from relatively new pairs. During the last field season I collected very detailed pair behaviour data which we will combine with the exceptional dataset of Mike Bull, who is running a long-term survey on this species since 30 years, and has generated some intimate knowledge of many pairs.
This promises to give us some tremendous new insight into the long-term monogamy of this species. Stay tuned for some further progress.
Sleepy Lizard, Tiliqua rugosa
Animal social behaviour is one of my major research interests, and why animals form social groups. Group formation (including pairs) has evolved independently in numerous different species. Understanding the ultimate (evolutionary) factors and proximate mechanisms that influence and drive the formation of animal groups is a major challenge in evolutionary biology.
In this study, I investigated social attraction among tadpoles of the Green and Golden Bell Frog (Litoria aurea). The project was done in collaboration with Mike Mahony (University of Newcastle) and also Martin Whiting (Macquarie University), while I spent some time in his lab in Sydney.
Read the whole story and get the paper.
Litoria aurea
It is time for some belated field notes, since I am already back in the lab. I had a very busy and exciting field season, working on several aspects of the social behaviour of the sleepy lizard, Tiliqua rugosa.
I basically ran two projects during the field season:
Project on social networks: I used an experimental approach to investigate the drivers and the consequences of sleepy lizard social networks. I collected data on a range of different aspects, including animal personalities, ecto- parasites and gut bacteria.
I attached miniature and light weight GPS units to all lizards of the study population to record very detailed data on social interactions between all lizards. This is very labour intensive and I had two great volunteers helping me with the data collection, Lewis McPherson from the Central Coast and Victor Etevenot, who came all the way from France. Great work, guys.
We stayed at Bundey Bore Station during our field work. That’s the long-term field station of the Bull lab. It is a great place to work – with its stunning sunsets, lizards and other wildlife.
Now I am back in Adelaide, analysing the detailed data that we collected. So stay tuned for some updates and future publications.
Sunset at Bundey Bore Station
The study site
Sleepy Lizard, Tiliqua rugosa
Tiliqua rugosa
Stephan T. Leu 