Head bobs, a series of quick pushups, and displays of a colorful double-chin. Life as a male anole lizard defending its territory against other male lizards is a lot of work. As is the life of the single-minded scientist who chooses to study them.
"Most of the time I work alone because it's a lot to ask for assistants to spend hours on their feet following lizards around all day," says Terry Ord, who is completing postdocs at both Harvard University and the University of California, Davis. Tough, too, to ask assistants to spend six weeks working seven days a week as Ord did on Jamaica, where he video-recorded lizards' behavior at dawn and at dusk.
Those are the most important times to capture the lizards' actions because they, like birds, send signals at dawn and dusk that delineate their territorial boundaries, telling other males that the females within are ...
