A ROBOTIC lizard has enticed real anolis lizards into revealing why they perform press-ups before attempting to impress their rivals with threatening displays.
Terry Ord from Harvard University and colleagues built a robot that mimicked the lizard’s competitive displays and placed it in a forest in Puerto Rico, where they filmed the behaviour of real lizards nearby.
The resulting footage revealed that when the robot did its press-ups, the neighbouring lizards turned to watch within a few seconds. Without the preliminaries, the rivals rarely watched the robot’s full threat display, particularly when the light was poor (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ). “It’s the equivalent of someone waving to attract your attention,” says Ord.
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