Want to become a Hide n Seek Champion? These color polymorphic lizards know what it’s like to be one.
On National Geographic, you will see lizards and chameleons changing their colors. Not many animals can change colors in their surrounding environment. Color changing is used to mask appearance, movement, and location. These key advantages allow lizards to avoid their prey when hunting and predators when being chased.
The Aegean Wall Lizard, Podarcis erhardii, color morph behavior occurs when they feel they’re in danger of a predator or contact with their prey. A research study group that included Kinsey M. Brock and Indiana E. Madden was curious to observe the escape behavior of color polymorphic lizards in the middle of their breeding season when most active. This study used two different populations from the island of Naxos.
The study took place during the summer in Greece to conduct this research. The sampling was essential to take place on warm sunny days, with minimal wind, since lizards were mainly active during this time. Color morph differences were examined in lizard escape behavior. The main question was, “Do color morphs have distinct strategies for avoiding predation?” A device called the Flight Initiation Distance (FID), which is a device that creates a buffer zone between human and animal populations. For the study, the researchers would spot a lizard with the color morph identity and sex with binoculars from a certain distance. After this, the experimenter would slowly approach the lizard and record its length from the point of flight initiation to where it reached its stopping point.
What was the result of this conducted study? Four hundred twenty lizards were measured for their escape behavior. The study found that white morphs re-emerged most frequently, then yellow and orange re-emerged the very least. One exciting thing from the study was that white morphs had the longest FIDs, orange morphs had the shortest FIDs, and yellow morphs had FIDs in between the other two. Since the white morphs were observed from a longer distance, they showed higher aggression and boldness. How fascinating is it that color morphism is such a beautiful and valuable attribute?
