Reptiles Magazine
Rise in temperatures on Japan s Izu islands caused Okada s five-lined skink to run faster.
January 9, 2021
A four decade study of Japan’s Okada’s five-lined skink (
Plestiodon latiscutatus) and its main predator, the Japanese four-lined rat snake (
Elaphe quadrivirgata), shows that higher body temperatures of the skink helps them run faster and more efficiently to escape from the snakes.
Researchers Ph.D student Félix Landry Yuan of the University of Hong Kong’s Research Division for Ecology & Biodiversity and Ph.D candidate Shun Ito of Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Life Science, published their research “
Predator presence and recent climatic warming raise body temperatures of island lizards” in the journal Ecology Letters. They continued the research of Professor Masami Hasegawa, who started the research in the early 1980s. Hasegawa launched the study when he noticed that the skinks behaved differently on Japan’s Izu islands witho
Credit: Masami Hasegawa
In a study spanning four decades, researchers from the University of Hong Kong s Research Division for Ecology & Biodiversity (HKU) in the Faculty of Science, and Toho University s Department of Biology (Toho), Japan, have discovered that predation by snakes is pushing lizards to be active at warmer body temperatures on islands where snakes are present, in comparison to islands free from snakes. Their work also detected significant climatic warming throughout the years and found lizard body temperatures to have also increased accordingly. The findings show that lizard thermal biology is highly dependent on predation pressures and that body temperatures are rising suggest that such ectothermic predator-prey relationships may be changing under climatic warming.