Green anole displaying. Photo tweeted by Igor Alesenko.
A recent area of research in animal behavior and evolutionary biology has concerned the evolution of signals and how they are tuned to their environment to maximize detectability. Some great work on anoles has explored how variation in dewlaps both within and among species may reflect the different light environments in different places–anoles should evolve dewlap colors that contrast against their background, given the available light. Or, in behavioral terms, anoles might choose particular spots in the environment to maximize contrast.
The photo above was tweeted by Igor Alesenko, who appears to be Russian (and who has tweeted 26,980 times to his 44,147 followers–am I missing something here?). I think it’s a nice example of why contrasting with the background vegetation is important to enhance communication effectiveness (though, of course, to really assess how detectable this lizard would be to another would require analyzing the real lizard rather than a photograph and doing so in the context of the lizard’s visual system, which is more adept at detecting color variation, including in the UV spectrum, than is that of humans).
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