Meeting Abstract
130.6 Tuesday, Jan. 7 14:45 Interspecific variation in chemical signal devices in lacertid lizards – A family-wide comparison of femoral pore numbers BAECKENS, S.*; EDWARDS, S.; HUYGHE, K.; VAN DAMME, R.; University of Antwerp; Stellenbosch University; University of Antwerp; University of Antwerp simon.baeckens@uantwerpen.be
Animals communicate through an astonishing variety of signals and displays. The effects of the physical environment on various characteristics of the sensory channels have been studied extensively for visual and acoustic communication systems. Much less is known on how the environment affects the evolution of chemical communication. Lizards are known to possess a remarkable diversity of glands, but only recently the role of their chemicals became apparent in lizard social behavior, i.e. prey detection, predator avoidance and mate recognition. Femoral glands produce a secretion that finds its way to the external world through epidermal structures, the so- called femoral pores. With more than 250 species inhabiting a wide variety of habitats, the family Lacertidae constitutes an excellent model to study the effects of the physical environment on the evolution of chemical communication. Our preliminary inquiries revealed considerable among-species variation in the number of femoral pores (0-35 per limb), suggesting that chemical signalling systems of different species may be under strong divergent selection. In this study, we test the hypothesis that the number of pores (a proxy for the investment in chemical signalling) varies among species living on different substrates and in different climatic conditions. We expect that chemical communication will be more challenging for species living in complex, rapidly changing, ephemeral environments (e.g. moist vegetation, flimsy), on adsorptive substrates (e.g. sands versus rocks) or in warm, humid and windy environments, due to the lower detectability and/or signal persistence. This hypothesis is tested in an explicit phylogenetic context, by constructing a phylogenetic tree from available DNA sequences of 213 species covering all sampled lacertid genera.
