Meeting Abstract
An organism’s embryonic environment can strongly impact its post-hatching phenotype. Therefore, in oviparous species, it is advantageous for females to choose nesting sites with conditions conducive to offspring development. In lizards that bury their eggs, the soil moisture, temperature, and depth of a nesting site can all impact offspring fitness; however, the extent to which each of these factors individually impacts female oviposition site choice is unclear. To quantify female nesting site conditions, we housed 35 wild-caught female brown anole (Anolis sagrei) lizards in small groups. In each cage, females had the choice of oviposition in one of two “nesting boxes” containing moist soil: the heated box, which was placed over a heating pad controlled by a thermostat, and the ambient box, which was maintained in ambient conditions. In both boxes, we measured soil moisture and depth for each nesting site, and calculated the temperature at each location where an egg was laid. We predicted that the females would avoid dangerously warm nesting sites near the bottom of the heated box, and that the depth of nesting sites would thus be more variable in the ambient box. Preliminary findings indicate that on average, oviposition sites were deeper and more moist in the ambient boxes than in the heated boxes. Half of the nesting sites were found in the ambient boxes, and half were found in the heated boxes. However, in both boxes, all oviposition sites were warmer than 26 °C and cooler than 33 °C, a range previous research has shown to result in viable anole hatchlings. These preliminary findings suggest that females avoided nesting site conditions likely to result in low fitness offspring.
