Social Lizards fun facts
- Armadillo Lizards (Ouroborus cataphractus) are a heavily-armoured lizard that is endemic to South Africa, and lives in large groups! Their armour protects them from predators, and they curl into a tight ball when threatened. This makes it harder for predators to access their soft belly.
- Egernia are a group of social skinks that occur in Australasia, and often are referred to as a collective that encompasses 60 species across seven genera. A striking feature of Egernia is that some species form stable social aggregations with relatives. At the extreme, this includes species where males and females form long-term pair-bonds and hold territories where juveniles remain with their parents for multiple years.
- The Large-scaled Girdled Lizard (Cordylus macropholis) is another group-living African lizard. This lizard has a unique relationship with a plant – Medusa’s Head from the Cape (Euphorbia caput-medusae). It lives and shelters deep within the serpent-like stems of this plant, and is likely protected within them because when touched the plant exudes a milky latex. This relationship may be akin to clownfish and anemones – but more work need to be done to tease it apart.
- Do lizards care for their young? Yes! In fact, they have a surprising diversity of parental care behaviours – ranging from simple egg and nest attendance to prolonged parent-offspring associations after birth or hatching. Parental care is relatively simple in lizards, compared to birds and mammals, and the benefits are simple too. Rather than direct parental provisioning (like feeding), offspring are able to access resources that are associated with their parents, can gain protection from hungry neighbours and predators, and may socially-learn from their parents.
- North American Night Lizards (Xantusia vigilis) thermally benefit from aggregating during the winter, and these benefits translate into increased survival and reproductive success in this species!
Social lizards and the Whitehead Lab
Julia Riley is a Postdoc doing her work on social lizards in the lab.
Current projects
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Julia Riley (Postdoc): My research focuses on studying the social behaviour of reptiles; this includes describing species’ social structure and mating systems for the first time, examining the consequences of a social life for reptiles, and testing if reptiles can socially-learn from one another. My current projects focus on understanding sociality in the Australian Tree Skink (Egernia striolata), African Girdled Lizards, and North American Painted Turtles. Collaborators and myself are seeking to answer questions like: How to reptiles benefit from living in groups or with relatives? What is the nature of reptilian social behaviour? Do reptile social systems hold clues about the evolutionary origins of social behaviour?
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