During her time as a graduate student in evolutionary biology at Harvard University, Ambika Kamath made a decision not to research anoles, the lizards that her adviser, Jonathan Losos, specialized in.
However, Losos encouraged her to work with anoles because it was well known that males hold individual territories and females only mate with the male whose territory they reside in. This would make it easier for Kamath to study how anole territoriality differed across different habitats, such as forests and parks.
As a result, Kamath traveled to Florida where she identified individual anoles and tracked their movements on a daily basis. Kamath’s study of the anoles was more extensive than any previous research, according to Losos, who is now at Washington University in St. Louis. However, instead of revealing territorial differences, the massive dataset showed that the anoles were not actually territorial at all.
Kamath delved into the historical record to investigate the origins of the idea of anole territoriality. It began with a 1933 paper that described frequent sexual behavior between male lizards in a laboratory setting. The authors of the paper concluded that this behavior must be “prevented by something” in the wild, which they inferred to be the males protecting territories. Kamath explains that this initial conclusion was based on a homophobic response to observing male-male copulation. Despite its shaky foundation, this conclusion gained traction and later researchers assumed it to be true.
2023-07-05 06:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org