Meeting Abstract

87.4  Wednesday, Jan. 7  Evolutionary relationships between locomotion and morpho-physiology in Tropidurinae Lizards KOHLSDORF, T*; NAVAS, CA; University of Sao Paulo, FFCLRP; University of Sao Paulo, IB tiana@usp.br

The locomotor performance of wild lizards results from interactions between behavioral, physiological and morphological characteristics of individuals and the structural properties of the habitat they occupy. If animals exhibit proper performance in a given ecological setting, traits of external morphology are probably finely tuned with biomechanical and physiological traits. Such associations were assessed by a multivariate approach detecting principal components among parameters of morphology (5 traits), muscle physiology (3 traits) and energetics (2 traits), measured in eight Tropidurinae species from a wide range of Brazilian non-forested habitats, and then correlating the scores of the components with locomotor performance (running on different substrates and jumping). A phylogenetic complementary approach (with independent contrasts) was also used. Four factors were retained in the conventional PCA: 1) tail and foot lengths and resting metabolic rates, 2) body size and proportion of FG and FOG muscle fibers, 3) limb lengths, and 4) SO muscle fibers and activity metabolic rates. From all locomotor performances measured, only sprint speeds on sand correlated with one of the factors retained, which was related to tail and foot lengths and resting metabolic rates. The PCAs performed using independent contrasts retained the same four factors, but body size was associated to the component relating tail and foot lengths with resting metabolic rates, which was positively correlated with jumping capacity. Therefore, in Tropidurinae lizards morpho-physiological associations can be detected, but only one morpho-physiological component (of foot and tail morphology associated with resting metabolic rates) correlates with the locomotor performance exhibited.