Boglárka Mészáros

Balaton Limnological Research Institute

Context Human-induced landscape modification, such as urbanization, creates new environments that can have adverse effects on flora and fauna, posing threats to biodiversity. Understanding how reptiles respond to urbanization is crucial, especially in light of their ongoing population declines. Objectives We examined the influence of landscape-sca...

The expansion of urban areas leads to a decrease in natural habitats, resulting some species to live in urban environments. Novel environmental factors might influence their size, body condition and development stability. The environmentally induced developmental instability can be indicated by fluctuating symmetry, which means random deviations fr...

Sexual signals serve as an honest indicator of individual quality, reflecting either developmental and/or maintenance costs. A possible underlying physiological mechanism is oxidative stress, which could mediate energy trade-offs between sexual signals and other quality traits. In ectotherms, thermal performance acts as a key indicator of individua...

Theory of sexual selection states that males often develop showy signals, which reduce their survival but increase their reproductive success. During mate choice, these conspicuous signals can be honest indicators of individual quality conveying information about the signaler's physiological state. Sexually selected signals are influenced by many e...

Understanding the background mechanisms affecting the emergence and maintenance of consistent between-individual variation within population in single (animal personality) or across multiple (behavioural syndrome) behaviours has key importance. State-dependence theory suggests that behaviour is ‘anchored’ to individual state (e.g. body condition, g...

Results of LMMs on activity and risk taking. F statistics (numerator and denominator df in parentheses) and P values are shown. Significant effects are in bold font. SVL = snout to vent length; basking = basking time treatment; food = food treatment. (DOCX)

Results of GLMs on predictability of activity and risk taking in the pooled sample and in the different treatment groups. First, we ran separate GLMs on the pooled sample with all possible interactions for activity predictability and risk-taking predictability. Second, based on the highest order significant interaction for the given behaviour, we r...

Change in body weight of adult male European green lizards (Lacerta viridis) between the low- and high food treatment groups. Body weight change is represented by group specific means of individual slopes. 95% confidence intervals are shown. (TIF)

Snout to vent length (SVL) and body weight of the assessed adult male European green lizards (Lacerta viridis). (XLSX)

Activity and risk-taking of the assessed adult male European green lizards (Lacerta viridis). Raw data are shown. (XLSX)

During female mate choice, conspicuous male sexual signals are used to infer male quality and choose the best sire for the offspring. The theory of parasite-mediated sexual selection (Hamilton-Zuk hypothesis) presumes that parasite infection can influence the elaboration of sexual signals: resistant individuals can invest more energy into signal ex...