1. Stephanie Godfrey, Andrew Sih, C. Michael Bull
The response of a sleepy lizard social network to altered ecological conditions
Stephanie Godfrey, Andrew Sih, C. Michael Bull
Hannah Kienzle & Marissa Hackman

2. Questions
Do changes in rainfall and climate over 3 years affect lizard body condition and behaviour (activity and home range use)
Do these changes influence social structure?
Hypotheses
Overall, frequency of interactions would increase due to aggregation during dry periods
Intersexual pairing associations in network have lower strength with drier conditions
Non-pairing associations increase with drier conditions

3. Title
“The response of a sleepy lizard social network to altered ecological conditions”
What other conditions? They only really care about rainfall

4. Introduction Missing information: Types of interactions?
Intrasexual interactions
They measured and analyzed this, but never mention what these consist of
More on sleepy lizard biology
They only wrote 2 sentences
Source: Haydyn Bromley

5. Introduction
They are mainly focusing on the effect of environmental change on aspects of the social network
However, these lizards are not in a controlled environment and there may be multiple changes at once, cannot directly test
They mention guppies and population response to changes in predation risk
What about the lizards? Did their predator populations fluctuate over the 3 years?

6. Introduction GPS loggers:
“Allow deeper insight into cryptic aspects of their social system beyond pair associations”
If they wanted insight into activity beyond pair associations, why study during breeding time?
“Most of annual activity was confined to this period”
Then maybe they aren’t very social (beyond mating)? Is this worth studying?

7. Methods - Study Area How did they section off area?
Captured all lizards within area
What if home range extended outside of this zone?
Homogeneity of area
Small ponds?
Bushes?
Refuge density
Patch density and quality

8. Methods

9. Methods - Timing - Start pairing up around September
- Mate end of October, early November, then separate -

10. Methods - Timing
Breeding season (Sept-Nov) lies within study period (Aug to Dec)
Did interactions change throughout study period as breeding starts/ends?
Is 3 years enough to examine differences in climate?
Pseudoreplication?

11. Methods
Tested whether home range area or activity level varied between years for the 30 individuals that were observed in all three years
How did they know these were the same 30 individuals?
Tend to molt 4-5 times a year

12. Methods GPS and activity loggers
Lizards interacting when 2m apart, but GPS precision is 6m
So they used 14m as their interaction distance...

14. Methods - Social Network
Based on frequency of two active lizards near each other
What about one active lizard? What if they approach slowly? … etc.
Can’t quantify length of interactions
Used ideal gas model
This implies that there are no physical barriers

15. Methods - Social Network
To deal with varying number of lizards, they took subset of 40 from the central part of the enclosure
Was this randomized? How did they choose? ? ?
Source: Stephan Leu

16. Results - Climate and Body Condition
Is 3 years long enough to compare climate?
Longer dry periods may change amount of activity
Temperature lowest in 2010
How important is temperature?
Source: Mark Semeniuk

17. Results - Social Networks
Table 3 with associations was difficult to interpret
“Significantly correlated associations”

18. Results - Social Networks
Degree strength, clustering coefficient, mean edge weight results
Difficult to read and interpret, did not relate terms back to what they translate to biologically
Why include useless figures?
Clustering coefficient and network density were not significant, yet they included graphs/tables

19. Results - Overall Too much?
rainfall, temperature, body condition, intersexual and intrasexual associations and strength, pair and extra pair strength, strength (overall), degree, clustering coefficient, mean edge weight

20. Discussion
Explain that in previous studies, low rainfall = less food = less foraging time
They never look at food availability
“Although all changes we detected were apparent responses to the very dry year in 2008 our study was inadequately replicated to make rigorous conclusions”
They made conclusions anyway, as it is the basis for the whole paper

21. Discussion
“Our major aim was not to attribute changes in network structure to specific climatic conditions. Instead we asked whether networks retained their structure over ecologically variable conditions.”
Although they looked at changes over time instead of spatial differences in climate, they only really looked at one specific condition (rainfall)

22. Discussion
Intrasexual interactions (specifically male- male) year to year did not change in strength, but position in network relative to each other changed
They said that they can’t explain without observations
Extra pair increase in dry conditions
They don’t know if mating is actually occurring

23. General thoughts
They can’t really directly analyze the effects of rainfall on social network, even though this is the focus of their entire paper
Need more than 3 years
Could have been more focused

24. Questions?