Stable Social Grouping in Lizards

Abstract

Social behavior is extremely diverse. It ranges from simple and brief interactions between two individuals for the purposes of mating to complex interactions between individuals that occur within large cooperative societies (Szekely et al. 2010; Rubenstein and Abbot 2017). Because of the near ubiquity of social behavior across sexually reproducing animal species, and the fact that our own species is one of the most social of all organisms, there has been a fundamental interest in understanding its ecological and evolutionary causes and consequences.