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.
Click here for original story, Research on Japanese Izu Islands finds rising lizard temperatures may change predator-prey relationship with snakes
Source: Phys.org