by Noble | Jul 26, 2014 | Uncategorized
Social learning—the ability of an animal or human to acquire information by learning from the actions of others is a short-cut to solving many of life’s problems or simply acquiring information more quickly. Just think back to when you got your first video recorder...
by Whiting | Jul 26, 2014 | Book club, Books
Here is the second in our series of book reviews by members of the Lizard Lab. Review by James Baxter-Gilbert Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe. Mario...
by Whiting | Jul 6, 2014 | Books, Lizard Lab book club
The Lizard Lab has a book club that we launched a few years ago to showcase what the lab was reading. We have now added a book reviews page and the first book review is posted below. Click on the Book Club tab (main menu bar) to learn more about what lab members are...
by Whiting | Jun 29, 2014 | Behaviour, Dispatches from the field, Lab news, Social behaviour, Tree skink project
Part I By Martin Whiting This post is long-overdue! Here, we are reporting on two field trips to our new study site in Albury, in New South Wales, close to the border with Victoria. In December of last year, Martin, Dan and Geoff While (University of Tasmania) went on...
by Noble | Jun 21, 2014 | Behaviour, Publications, Sexual selection, Water skink project
By Dan Noble When it comes to animal athletics lizards have been model systems for exploring the relationships between ecology and physical performance. Our two recent papers, one in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society and the second in Behavioral...
by Whiting | May 21, 2014 | Behaviour, Habitat use, Lab news, Lizard ecology, Publications
In the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa sociable weaver nests are a prominent feature in the landscape. These large nests typically occupy camelthorn trees and provide a refuge to a range of organisms, including Kalahari tree skinks (Trachylepis spilogaster). They...
by Riley | Apr 27, 2014 | Dispatches from the field, Lab news, Social behaviour, Tree skink project
By Julia Riley The Tree Skink (Egernia striolata) field crew has just returned from fieldwork in South Australia. We (Julia, James, Martin and Dan) were checking out two new field sites for potential long-term monitoring of social systems. Our trip began by flying to...
by Whiting | Mar 25, 2014 | Behaviour, Cognition, Herpetology, Publications, Water skink project
Followers of the Lizard Lab blog will have read previous reports about relatively rapid learning in lizards. In those studies we typically focused on males or avoided drawing comparisons between the sexes because either the sample size was limited or the focus of the...
by Whiting | Feb 14, 2014 | Science news, Sexual selection, Social behaviour, Uncategorized
Lizard Lab alumnus Pau Carazo is best known for his work on communication in lizards. Along the way he has dabbled with beetles and now, fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). In a recent paper in Nature, Pau and his colleagues at Oxford designed a novel series of...
by Whiting | Feb 10, 2014 | Cane toads, Lab news, Lizard Lab adventures, Water dragon project
Freek Vonk is a Dutch scientist and nature documentary presenter. He and his crew have just wrapped season 1 of “Freek in Australia”. Part of this series consisted of a day at our lab filming cane toads and discussing our work on cognition followed by a...
