Meeting Abstract
The fact that establishing dominance relations in reptiles often involves aggressive behaviour and possible injuries makes it a concern for zoo management programs as well as private keepers and scientific research. While male dominance has mostly been investigated in dyadic encounters, our study looked at dominance in a multiple-male group. Ten groups of four A. carolinensis lizards were housed together to investigate the effects of dominance across multiple contexts such as access to food sources, reproduction and predation. Our results showed that dominant individuals had priority to food sources while also having a higher risk of predation. No differences were found between dominant and subordinate males in a context of reproduction. Dominant individuals did perform more social displays across different contexts. These behavioural results are linked to a number of physiological variables such as body weight, tail width and Heterophil to lymphocyte ratio to get a better view of the physiological effects of dominance in a multiple male group.
