Motion displays are a feature of social signalling by many of Australia’s dragon lizards (Family: Agamidae). They are used in a variety of situations but are particularly useful for territory defense as assessment is possible from a distance and potentially harmful physical confrontations can be avoided. Nevertheless, scientific consideration of the signalling behaviour of Australian agamid lizards has been surprisingly overlooked. A major part of this project considers movement-based signalling in an ecological framework by comparing the signalling behaviour of sympatric and allopatric species, as well as comparing the signalling behaviour of single species across different populations in a range of habitats.
An additional component of the project is to consider factors that influence variation in social behaviour of lizards more generally. To this end we consider factors such as ecological, social and physiological determinants of behaviour.
