Bold lizards of all sizes have higher mating success

Bold lizards of all sizes have higher mating success

6 years ago
Anonymous $CLwNLde341

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-bold-lizards-sizes-higher-success.html

The yellow-spotted monitors (Varanus panoptes), affectionately known as goannas, are related to Komodo dragons and share many of their larger cousins' behaviors. Adults can be 1.6 meters long, and some males grow larger. The lizards hunt insects, frogs, and small mammals, and scavenge whatever they can get.

"This boldness syndrome was not only quantifiable, it correlated with a heap of ecological traits that we were monitoring. We we were only able to figure that out because we were radiotracking individuals to assess their home ranges and the characteristics of the habitats that they were choosing to stay in during the two distinct seasons," Ward-Fear said. "It was based on intuition really, to start with, but we couldn't have imagined how many correlations we would pull out based on the behavioral differences within individuals."