Liu Jian, Hu Qiaohan, Qi Yin
Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu 610041, China.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Animals (Basel). 2024 Dec 27;15(1):38. doi: 10.3390/ani15010038.
The social complexity hypothesis suggests that complex social interactions drive the evolution of sophisticated communicative signals. While the relationship between social communication and the complexity of sound and color signals has been extensively studied, the correlation between social communication and movement-based visual signal complexity remains underexplored. In this study, we selected the Asian agamid lizard, , as our model system. Through a combination of controlled experiments, behavioral observations, and signal quantification, we examined the relationship between social communications and variation in movement-based visual signals and tested our social complexity hypothesis. Our experiments revealed that males significantly decreased the tail coil duration during the mating season to deal with high social interaction. Conversely, females significantly increased the tail display duration and variation in mean tail coil amplitude in line with the intensity of parental care, and tail display duration showed a significant and positive correlation with female reproductive investment. These findings suggest that social communication plays an important role in shaping the changes in movement-based visual signals, providing new evidence for the social complexity hypothesis.
社会复杂性假说认为，复杂的社会互动推动了复杂交流信号的进化。虽然社会交流与声音和颜色信号复杂性之间的关系已得到广泛研究，但社会交流与基于动作的视觉信号复杂性之间的相关性仍未得到充分探索。在本研究中，我们选择亚洲鬣蜥作为我们的模型系统。通过控制实验、行为观察和信号量化相结合的方式，我们研究了社会交流与基于动作的视觉信号变化之间的关系，并检验了我们的社会复杂性假说。我们的实验表明，在交配季节，雄性为应对高度的社会互动，显著缩短了尾部盘绕时长。相反，雌性则根据亲代抚育的强度，显著增加了尾部展示时长和平均尾部盘绕幅度的变化，且尾部展示时长与雌性生殖投入呈显著正相关。这些发现表明，社会交流在塑造基于动作的视觉信号变化方面发挥着重要作用，为社会复杂性假说提供了新的证据。
