Gliding lizards mimic falling leaves to avoid predators

The rainforests of South-East Asia are home to the world’s only living gliding lizards. 

The reptiles resemble miniature flying dragons and use membranes supported by extended rib bones, like wings, to glide between trees in their territories.

Gliding is an important means of travel for these lizards and new research suggests that some populations of the lizard Draco cornutus have evolved gliding membranes that closely match the colours of falling leaves to reduce the risk of predation as they glide between trees in the rainforest.

The study was conducted by PhD student Danielle Klomp, based at the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales with supervisors Dr Terry Ord (University of NSW) and Dr Devi Stuart-Fox (University of Melbourne) and collaborator Dr Indraneil Das from the University of Malaysia. Her research has been published in the international journal Biology Letters.

The team travelled to Borneo and observed two populations of a gliding lizard that have different coloured gliding membranes and which occupy very different habitats.

One population has red gliding membranes, which match the colour of the red falling leaves of their coastal mangrove forest habitat. The other population has dark brown and green gliding membranes, which match the colours of falling leaves in their lowland rainforest habitat.

They determined how the colours would be perceived by a predatory bird and found that the gliding membrane colour would be indistinguishable from a falling leaf in the same forest.

“Birds can see ultraviolet light as well as the colours that humans see, so it is important to take into account how closely the colours would actually match to a bird,” Ms Klomp says.

“It’s a cool finding because these gliding lizards are matching the colours of falling leaves and not the leaves that are still attached to the tree. In the mangrove population the leaves on the trees are bright green, but turn red shortly before falling to the ground, and it is this red colour that the lizards mimic in their gliding membranes. This allows them to mimic a moving part of the environment – falling leaves – when they are gliding.”

The team also filmed hours of gliding lizard behaviour to observe how often the colours were displayed in communication with other lizards.

“We found that both the red and green/brown gliding membranes do seem to have evolved specifically to resemble the falling leaves in each population’s particular habitat, and are rarely used for communication,” Ms Klomp says.

“Perhaps these populations may have originally had the same gliding membrane colours but as they have moved into different forest types their colours have adapted to closely resemble the colours of falling leaves in the different forests, known as divergent evolution.”

www.zoology.unimelb.edu.au