Reptilian Love, Loss & Mourning

Ned and Sunny stretch out together on the warm sand. He rests his head on her back, and every so often he might give her an affectionate nudge with his nose. The pair is quiet and, like many long-term couples, they seem perfectly content just to be in each other’s presence.

The couple are monogamous, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom. But Sunny and Ned are a bit scalier that your typical lifelong mates — they are shingleback lizards that live at Melbourne Museum in Australia.

In the wild, shinglebacks regularly form long-term bonds, returning to the same partner during mating season year after year. One lizard couple in a long-term study had been pairing up for 27 years and were still going strong when the study ended. In this way, the reptiles are more like some of the animal kingdom’s most famous long-term couplers, such as albatrosses, prairie voles and owl monkeys, and they confound expectations many people have about the personalities of lizards.

“There’s more socially going on with reptiles than we give them credit for,” said Sean Doody, a conservation biologist at the University of South Florida.

[---]

One of the most fascinating discoveries of reptile social behavior — long-term monogamy in shingleback lizards like Ned and Sunny — happened entirely by accident.

Michael Bull, the Australian biologist who made the discovery, was initially less focused on lizards and more interested in studying the different species of ticks that lived on them. Beginning in 1982, he would capture shinglebacks, mark them, take various measurements, then release them. After several years (and thousands of lizards), he noticed that each spring, after months apart, the same males and females would somehow manage to find each other.

Shingleback courtship is perhaps not the most romantic by human standards.

“The male will trail the female around for a number of weeks, often a few months, and defend that female from any other male that tries to encroach,” said Jane Melville, senior curator of terrestrial vertebrates at Museums Victoria Research Institute in Australia. Males have also been seen allowing their mates to eat first, she said.

Actually, this last behavior is a good move for males of a number of species. Another lizard species, the Central American whiptail, has been observed offering a potential partner a lovely dead frog to eat before mating.

But shingleback love stories don’t always have happy endings. “It’s very tragic,” said Martin Whiting, a behavioral ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Occasionally, they get squashed on the road and the other one will be nudging it. And then it’s very difficult for them to pair up again.”

Dr. Whiting said the lizards can remain with their dead partners for quite some time, continuing to nudge their lifeless bodies. Could this be similar to the quasi-mourning behaviors observed in primates and cetaceans?

While we can’t definitively say that these lizards grieve, Dr. Whiting said, “I would certainly say we can’t discount that certain species that have that strong pair bond might.”

- More Here

We should stop using the detrimental phrase -  "reptilian brain" (Amygdala). 

This is 101 science; life long hard work of one scientist, Michael Bull, can teach us so much and change our understanding of entire branch of species. 

Thank you, sir.