Our study provides a simple yet comprehensive explanation for why non-aposematic lizards use defensive conspicuous coloration, and may assist understanding the ubiquity
of such coloration in other taxa too. Many lizards have conspicuous dorsal stripes and colorful tails. The popular ideas assert that stripes cause a “motion dazzle” which hampers predators’ ability to intercept moving targets, while colorful tails divert predator attacks to the dispensable body part which can be autotomized. However, a major
difficulty remains in explaining the advantage of such defense strategies. This is because, stripes and colorful tails may expose the prey, increasing the chances of attack. To address this fundamental issue, we developed a simple model. The model predicts that conspicuous stripes and colorful tails are beneficial only for active foragers, which are highly detectable regardless of their coloration. To test this prediction, we used a comparative phylogenetic-based comparative approach that included two literature surveys of more than 3000 lizard species.
Results/Conclusions
We found that striped lizards were substantially more mobile than lizards with cryptic patterns and strong association between colorful tails and dorsal stripes across species and between ontogenetic stages of the same species. Our work provide first empirical support for the hypothesized association between lizard dorsal pigmentation patterns and foraging behavior. This simple yet comprehensive explanation may be relevant to many other taxa that present variation in body pigmentation patterns.