Urban Lizards

Subject – Environment

Context – A team of scientists from IISc research about how urban lizards sleep at night

Concept –

The team was hunting for a species of lizards, Rock Agamas, to study how urbanisation has affected their sleep patterns.
They found that urban lizards “use sleep sites that mirror the structural, thermal and light properties of natural habitats”.
City lizards choose sleep sites that resemble that of their rural counterparts in the type of surface and the amount of light and heat received.
The remarkable flexibility in sleep behaviour displayed by urban lizards is likely to help them cope in a city.
Both rural and urban lizards are dependent on rough, rocky substrates.
Urban sleep sites were nine times more likely to be sheltered and covered as compared to rural sites, and this helped address the light problem in urban areas.
This indicates that the lizards try to mitigate urban stressors by being flexible in their sleep site choices, and end up picking sites that resemble their rural sites.