Three yellow patches differently correlate with escape behaviour, morphological traits, leukocytes, parasites, and hormones in a lizard species

Abstract

Multiple within individual and non-redundant signals can convey complementary information about individual quality in lizards. This visual information is commonly provided by colour patches of different hues (red, yellow, blue). However, whether different within-individual colour patches of a single hue can contain non-redundant information remains understudied. To test this idea, we investigated the spectrophotometric reflectance of three colour patches in adult males of Acanthodactylus erythrurus, a lizard of the family Lacertidae that has colour patches that look similarly yellow to the human eye. We modelled the spectral variables of these patches using model averaging and cross-validation as a function of head volume and body length (proxies of resource allocation to somatic growth), escape behaviour (proxy of quality to cope with stress), body condition (proxy of nutritional state), leukocytic profiles (proxy of immune state), and faecal testosterone metabolites (proxy of reproductive state and aggression). The different relationships of the three “yellow” patches with the independent predictors analysed suggested that they can provide complementary information about the males’ quality in the context of the sexual selection theory.