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Archives of The Cold Blooded NewsThe Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological SocietyVolume 31, Number 6; June, 2004 |
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Herp Atlas Launched Desert Tortoise Social Behavior Horned Lizards, Shrikes, and Evolution Landlubber Chameleons Herp-of-the-Month - California Kingsnake Zebra-Tailed Lizard PREVIOUS ISSUES May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 2003 Index 2002 Index Earlier Issues About the Cold Blooded News CHS Home Page |
Horned Lizards, Shrikes, and Evolutionby Greg LavineReprinted from Herp Digest, Vol.4, No.34, April 19, 2004.Originally from the Salt Lake Tribune. Over a period of recent summers, to see if Arizona's horned lizard was a threatened species, Utah State University's Kevin Young and his field team were tracking one with a transmitter on a Marine Corps bombing range in Arizona. They had followed the signal to a bush. After a futile search beneath the plant, a field worker finally found the lizard. "There was a lizard hanging right in front of her face," Young said of the searcher. "She shouted 'It's been shriked'." A predatory bird known as a shrike had impaled it on a twig. Young's team decided to start collecting such skeletons as trophies. These tiny mementos eventually produced a study on natural selection that appeared in last week's edition of Nature. Researchers long believed that the length of a lizard's horns appears to play a role in how well the reptile defends itself against the robin-sized shrikes. But the paper in Nature was the first to show with concrete evidence that not only was this true, but how as a result shrikes were helping determine the evolution of this lizard species. "It not only reveals selection but also pinpoints the mechanism," said Kelly Zamudio, a biologist at Cornell University, who was not part of the study. Despite the excitement about this discovery, to Young and his team, it was only a side project. The original study, to see if the horned lizard is threatened, continues. Copyright © 1998 - 2006, Colorado Herpetological Society. All rights reserved. | ||
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