Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 123, January 2017, Pages 359-367
Animal Behaviour

Urbanization affects refuge use and habituation to predators in a polymorphic lizard

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.11.016Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The common wall lizard is a synantropic and colour polymorphic species.

  • We investigated effects of habitat and colour morph on antipredator response.

  • Urbanization affected refuge use and habituation to disturbance.

  • We detected different antipredator strategies between colour morphs.

  • Antipredator response revealed different levels of behavioural plasticity.

Prey–predator interactions are plastic behaviours shown by both players, which constantly modify their decisions depending on physiological conditions and ecological context. We investigated whether the behavioural response to repeated simulated predatory attacks varied between adult males of the common wall lizard, Podarcis muralis, inhabiting environments characterized by different degrees of human presence. Our aim was to detect possible effects of urbanization on antipredator responses, in terms of activity, time spent hidden in refuges and habituation. Moreover, since this lizard species exhibits intrapopulation colour polymorphism, we looked for the occurrence of possible correlations between antipredator strategy and individual ventral coloration. We found that urban lizards spent less time in their refuge after predatory attacks and decreased successive hiding times faster than rural lizards, suggesting different wariness towards a potential predator. Irrespective of population, yellow lizards gradually spent less time in the refuge before appearing and emerging outside than the other two morphs. Conversely, red lizards showed progressively longer appearance and emergence times after successive tests, suggesting a growing sensitization to the potential threat of a predatory attack. In conclusion, our study showed the occurrence of different levels of behavioural plasticity in common wall lizard's antipredator response: the population level, depending on ecological context, here different degrees of exposure to human disturbance, and the individual level, which suggests the occurrence of morph-specific antipredator strategies. Thus, using a lizard species as a model, we shed light on two key points of evolutionary ecology concerning both the antipredator response and the factors driving the maintenance of intraspecific polymorphism.

Section snippets

Sampling and Housing

During spring 2014 (April–May, corresponding to the species' mating season in Italy) we captured sexually mature male lizards at two sites located in different habitats. The ‘urban’ site was located within a small town near Pavia, Lombardy (45°14′03.75″N, 9°10′41.67″E). Lizards were captured on concrete or wood structures within anthropic environments, in microhabitats such as boundary walls of houses, orchards, gardens, walls along roads, wood and tool sheds. The ‘rural’ site was located 30 km

Results

Overall, lizards were observed outside the refuge before an attack significantly more often than they were observed inside it (repeated measures ANOVA: F1,47 = 22.41, P < 0.0001) and leaning out (F1,47 = 30.88, P < 0.0001). Lizards hid in the refuge when subjected to the simulated attack; after that they usually first appeared from the refuge, monitored the outdoor environment for some time and finally emerged entirely. The habituation indices related to appearance and emergence generally showed a

Discussion

In the present study, we found that various factors, related to both environmental conditions and ventral colour polymorphism, might affect antipredator responses in male common wall lizards. First, habitat could affect antipredator responses, principally in relation to human disturbance. We are aware that our study has the limitation that we examined only one population for each habitat due to logistical difficulties in using many animals from multiple sites. For this reason, we cannot ensure

Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments, which helped us to improve the manuscript, Professor Paolo Galeotti for providing the necessary facilities for maintaining lizards in indoor conditions and Dr Guido Bernini for help in the field. Financial support for the study was partially provided by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad projects CGL2011-24150/BOS and CGL2014-53523-P.

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    Both authors contributed equally to the work.

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