Cold-blooded burrow sharing in Tibetan lizards

Gilead Amit, contributor

(Image: Qi et al/PLoS)

Cold-blooded by name, cold-blooded by nature. Parental care is a rarity among lizards, and despite the apparent intimacy of the Qinghai toad-headed agamas (Phrynocephalus vlangalii) pictured above, they are no exception to the rule.

The image shows a female toad-headed agama sharing her burrow in the Tibetan plateau with a youngster - a phenomenon which Yin Qi of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Chengdu and colleagues have found is rare even in the toughest of conditions.

Finding shelter is essential for surviving the cold Tibetan winters, and researchers predicted that in these critical conditions parents would allow offspring into their own burrows. Most of the juvenile lizards they found, however, were either living in abandoned burrows or else only temporarily cohabiting with a parent.

Burrow-sharing is thought to be an important index of social behaviour among lizards, whether between parents and offspring or between adults of either sex. Communities in which individuals share a living space are often capable of more advanced displays of sociality as well. After two months of daily inspection, however, few instances were found among the notoriously aggressive toad-headed agamas, other than the occasional overlap between adults of different sexes in the same burrow.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0041130

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2238d887/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C0A80Clizard0Emother0Eand0Echild0Ereunio0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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