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Abstract

Group living often requires strong levels of communication between individuals. This communication is usually studied in the context of visual or auditory communication. However, chemical communication is the most widely used form of communication. We examined the role of chemical communication in mediating social decisions in a group‐living lizard, Egernia stokesii. Specifically, we examined the extent to which scat‐piling, a behaviour by which individuals deposit scat in a communal area, affected the refuge choice of individual E. stokesii . To achieve this, we examined individual refuge choice in response to scat piles or single scats and against two types of scat stimuli, one being their own scat and the other being scat belonging to an unrelated and unfamiliar conspecific. We show that lizards behave differently when presented with a scat pile compared with a single scat, and whether the scat stimulus was their own or sourced from an unfamiliar conspecific. When scats were in piles, individuals spent more time inspecting, more time in, and more often chose the treatment refuge as their final refuge choice, at a trial’s end, when the treatment was their own scat compared with when the treatment was the refuge with the unfamiliar scat. In contrast, for individual scat treatments, individuals spent more time inspecting and more often ended up in the treatment refuge with an unfamiliar scat compared with when the treatment was their own scat. These results suggest that individuals are responding to information contained within multiple components of the scats - both their volume and their source. These results have implications for understanding how social aggregations are maintained within squamates, where sociality has evolved independently from other vertebrate lineages.

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Thompson, SA and Pearson, SK and While, GM and Chapple, DG and Gardner, MG
Keywords:	chemical cues, Egernia stokesii, reptile, scat, social signals, sociality
Journal or Publication Title:	Austral Ecology
Publisher:	Blackwell Publishing Asia
ISSN:	1442-9985
DOI / ID Number:	10.1111/aec.12864
Copyright Information:	Copyright 2020 Ecological Society of Australia
Related URLs:	Google Scholar: While, GM UTAS Profile: While, GM
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