Meeting Abstract

77.1  Wednesday, Jan. 6  Chemical Cues Indicate Familiarity And Body Size In Striped Plateau Lizards WEISS, S/L; FRITZSCHE, A/F*; University of Puget Sound, Tacoma WA; University of Puget Sound, Tacoma WA afritzsche@gmail.com

Reptilian chemical cues may communicate information about discrete character states such as species, gender, and individual identification, as well as continuously varying characteristics such as individual body size and condition. Here, we investigate whether chemical cues of the striped plateau lizard, Sceloporus virgatus, allow for the assessment of familiarity and body size. We first tested male tongue-flicks and other chemosensory behaviors in response to familiar vs. novel sociochemical environments (i.e., tanks with paper substrates marked by the focal male and a familiar female or by an unfamiliar male-female pair). We found that males performed significantly more chemosensory behavior in the novel environment. Male response to the novel environment was unrelated to the body size of the previous male resident but was positively related to the body size of the previous female resident, though only in one of two test years. To further investigate whether males gain information about female body size via chemical signals, we used a choice-test paradigm to assess male response to chemical cues from females that differed in body size by ~12%. We found that males responded more strongly to the largest and smallest females than they did to the intermediate-sized females. Combined, these results suggest that S. virgatus chemical cues provide information about familiarity and female body size. However, male response is more complicated than expected; we did not find a consistent preference for the cue from the largest available female, as is expected based on the selective advantage of mating with larger, more fecund females.