From Combat to Courtship: The Grammar of Lizard Headbob Displays

During this research experience, students will participate in a research study about lizard communication, asking whether and how lizards use visual displays during combat and courtship. In the first term, students will learn to formulate objective criteria and to minimize biases during the collection of complex behavioral data, and gain hands-on experience with these techniques while scoring video recordings of lizards in the field. In the second term, they will learn to develop interesting and important hypotheses, use the data to test those hypotheses, and present their results to a scientific audience.