Communication is critical for animals in order for them to be able to effectively relay information in various scenarios. Male Anolis sagrei lizards communicate by moving their head and body in rapid, abrupt up-and-down patterns and expanding a colorful throat fan called a dewlap. These signaling movements are used by conspecific males during territorial displays, and these motion patterns have evolved to be species-specific. In our research, we are exploring the concept of honest signaling in relation to these distinct motion patterns. An “honest signal” is defined as a signal that reliably correlates with some true feature of the signaling lizard. We explored the relationship between an individual’s body condition and the movement patterns of their visual displays. We presented a male lizard housed in an individual cage with an intruder and recorded displays using high-speed video. The presence or absence of an infrared heat lamp was used to alter the test lizards’ body temperature as changes in body temperature are known to affect the performance of muscle contractions in lizards. This experiment tested whether there was any relation between the speed and abruptness of head and body movement patterns and body temperature. We also presented lizards with a moving dot stimulus of a square wave function at different filtering speeds to determine how well lizards were able to distinguish slow and smooth patterns from rapid and abrupt ones. In our temperature experiments, we expect that warm lizards will signal more rapidly than cold lizards, implying that they have a superior body condition and are better fit to defend their territory. In our motion detection experiments, we expect lizards to respond more frequently to rapid, abrupt movements than to slow ones. If our results show that Anolis sagrei are able to discriminate different motion pattern velocities, and if we find that alteration in body temperature affects the speed of display movements, we can investigate the idea that variations in motion patterns can be used to provide an honest signal about an individual conspecific male’s body condition.
