A ROBOTIC lizard has enticed real anolis lizards into revealing why they perform press-ups before attempting to impress their rivals with threatening displays.
Terry Ord from Harvard University and colleagues built a robot that mimicked the lizard’s competitive displays and placed it in a forest in Puerto Rico, where they filmed the behaviour of real lizards nearby.
The resulting footage revealed that when the robot did its press-ups, the neighbouring lizards turned to watch within a few seconds. Without the preliminaries, the rivals rarely watched the robot’s full threat display, particularly when the light was poor (Proceedings of the National…
