Nice guys do finish first in lizards' evolutionary race
Getting beaten up by the neighborhood bully so your buddy can get some tail may seem like a rough life, but it not only works for some lizards, it also gives a fascinating peek into hard-wired altruism in evolutionary biology. Side-blotched lizards spend their year on earth looking to reproduce, and their strategies have lessons about evolution. An article in the May 9 edition of the Proce...Pressured by predators, lizards see rapid shift in natural selection
Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime -- within months -- as a population's needs change. In a study of island lizards exposed to a new predator, the scientists found that natural selection dramatically changed direction over a very short time, within a single genera...Lizards 'shout' against a noisy background
Lizards that signal to rivals with a visual display "shout" to get their point across, UC Davis researchers have found. Male anole lizards signal ownership of their territory by sitting up on a tree trunk, bobbing their heads up and down and extending a colorful throat pouch. They can spot a rival lizard up to 25 meters away, said Terry Ord, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis who is wor...Global survey of lizards reveals greater abundance of animals on islands than on mainland ecosystems
A comprehensive survey of lizards on islands around the world has confirmed what island biologists and seafaring explorers have long observed: Animals on islands are much more abundant than their counterparts on the mainland. Besides confirming that longstanding observation, the study signals an alarm for island populations in a rapidly warming world. It suggests that climate change may ha...More Lizards, Including Pets, Found Venomous
In a startling discovery, researchers have found that more lizard families than assumed till now are venomous, including several species that are popular pets. // The researchers, writing in the journal Nature (published online on Nov. 16), revealed that the symptoms like pain and swelling from lizard bites, which were previously attributed to the bacteria that thrive on bits of meat le...