Polygynandrous anoles and the myth of the passive female

Abstract

Kamath and Losos (Kamath A, Losos J (2017) Behav Ecol Sociobiol 71:89) appropriately pointed out that researchers studying Anolis lizards have persisted for years in erroneously assuming that females only mate with the territorial male with whom they share space. However, Bush and Simberloff (Bush JM, Simberloff D (2018) Behav Ecol Sociobiol, in press) correctly suggested that this error did not arise because male anoles are not territorial. Instead, I suggest that, as was the case for other vertebrate taxa, researchers studying Anolis mating systems implicitly assumed that females could be viewed as “resources” defended by males, and that each female passively mated with the male who won the territory that overlapped her home range. This assumption was maintained in spite of behavioral observations indicating that female anoles might have access to sperm from males other than the current territory owner, until it was explicitly refuted by genetic data indicating that some females mate with more than one male. However, we still don’t know the extent to which male anoles increase their paternity by defending territories that overlap with female ranges, or the extent to which female anoles increase their control over the paternity of their hatchlings by actively mating with or utilizing the sperm of different males.