Gonzalo Rodríguez-Ruiz

• PhD
• Researcher at Climate Research Foundation - Fundación para la Investigación del Clima

Self- and individual discrimination are needed to maintain social relationships. However the extent of precision of these abilities may depend on the social strategy of each individual, which may vary with ontogeny. Many animals use chemical cues to discriminate conspecifics. For example, many lizards use femoral gland secretions, which are compose...

Selecting a good mate is a decision with important fitness consequences. For this reason, mate choice has promoted the evolution of sexual ornaments signaling the quality of an individual. In fossorial animals, inhabiting visually restricted underground environments, chemical senses should be very important for mate choice. We examined whether sexu...

Discovering how non-human animals communicate has been a human ambition since Aristotle's time. Although many desire to learn to communicate with them, we are far from achieving this. However, it is undeniable that animals do communicate. For almost a century, behavioural ecology has shown that evolution has shaped social interaction in various way...

Habitat selection is a dynamic process that depends on many environmental variables than can vary with weather conditions. This is important because, within a context of global change, extreme weather events, such as severe droughts, are predicted to become more frequent. We examined the patterns of microhabitat selection and underground movements...

Chemosensory communication in lizards may be based on multiple compounds coming from multiple sources. Both secretions from external epidermal glands, and internal cloacal glands and feces are known to convey information (sex, familiarity, body size, etc.) for conspecifics. However, although some compounds in femoral gland secretions have been char...

Simple Summary Humans can alter the habitat quality and negatively affect many animals. However, some species seem able to cope with or even take advantage of these alterations. This study examines the effects of small anthropogenic alterations of a natural habitat on the feeding ecology of a gecko, Tarentola mauritanica. We compared geckos found i...

Background Many animals rely on chemical cues for intraspecific communication. This is especially important in fossorial animals because visual restrictions of the underground environment limit the opportunities for visual communication. Previous experiments showed the ability of the amphisbaenian Trogonophis wiegmanni to discriminate between sever...

Conspecific cues often provide social information on habitat quality that is considered when deciding to settle at a specific site. The type of sensory cues useful for this will depend on the environment. For amphisbaenians, reptiles adapted to an underground life with highly reduced sight, chemoreception is especially useful to recognize conspecif...

Simple Summary Soil alterations may negatively affect the health of animals living inside these soils, but these negative effects are often unexplored and remain “hidden” underground. This study examines the validity of a non-invasive technique to quantify glucocorticoid levels of the amphisbaenian Trogonophis wiegmanni, a fossorial burrowing repti...

Melanin is a fundamental pigment in animal coloration as it is involved in many different adaptive functions such as signaling or thermoregulation. Two forms of melanin are known to produce different colors (eumelanin: black; pheomelanin: yellow or brown). Here, we explored whether there were intersexual differences and/or size-related changes in m...

Arid climates are characterized by a summer drought period to which animals seem adapted. However, in some years, the drought can extend for unusually longer periods. Examining the effects of these current extreme weather events on biodiversity can help to understand the effects of climate change, as models predict an increase in drought severity....

Melanin is the basis of coloration in many animals, and although it is often used in communication, thermoregualtion or camouflage, melanin has many other physiological functions. For example, in polluted habitats, melanin can have a detoxifying function. Melanic coloration would help to sequester in the skin the heavy metals contaminants from insi...

Soil degradation may have strong negative consequences for soil biodiversity, but these potential effects are understudied and poorly understood. Concentration of nesting seabirds may be a source of soil pollution by heavy metals, which are incorporated into the food chain and may have toxicological effects in vertebrates, especially in fossorial a...

Foraging strategies aim to maximize the amount of food obtained while minimizing searching costs. To reduce these costs, animals use different strategies based on the use of personal or social information to exploit food patches. At the same time, the social attraction for food resources could increase competition intensity for them. Prior experien...

Investing in the current reproduction requires diverting energy resources from other metabolic functions, which may compromise future reproduction and lifespan. To solve this trade-off, an individual may consider its labile state to decide how much to invest in current reproduction. We tested experimentally whether the “state quality” of male rock...

Background The movement and spatial ecology of an animal depends on its morphological and functional adaptations to its environment. In fossorial animals, adaptations to the underground life help to face peculiar ecological challenges, very different from those of epigeal species, but may constrain their movement ability. Methods We made a long-te...

Animals often face situations that require quantity discrimination for decision-making. Differentiating between more and less amounts might be adaptative in different contexts such as in social relationships, navigation, or foraging. However, feeding close to conspecifics might change foraging behavior decisions due to changes in predation risk per...

An essential part of foraging ecology is to understand the processes of detection, recognition and discrimination of prey, as well as the sensorial modalities involved. Often, predators do not rely on a single sensory system but on multiple interacting senses. Specifically, lizards mainly use vision and vomerolfaction for prey pursuit. Here, we use...

Sexual signals can be evolutionarily stable if they are condition dependent or costly to the signaler. One of these costs may be the trade-off between maintaining the immune system and the elaboration of ornaments. Experimental immune challenges in captivity show a reduction in the expression of sexual signals, but it is not clear whether these det...

Individual recognition (IR) plays an important role in modulating social interactions of several animal species. IR may work at two fundamental levels: at class-level (CIR), if it allows group membership identification (e.g. familiar/unfamiliar), or at individual-level (true IR; TIR), if it allows uniquely recognizing conspecifics. Direct and indir...

One way that maternal effects may benefit the offspring is by informing them about the characteristics of the environment. Through gestation, environmentally induced maternal effects might promote in the offspring-specific behavioral responses like dispersal or residence according to their new habitat characteristics. Females of the Carpetan rock l...

Differences in both stable and labile state variables are known to affect the emergence and maintenance of consistent interindividual behavioral variation (animal personality or behavioral syndrome), especially when experienced early in life. Variation in environmental conditions experienced by gestating mothers (viz. nongenetic maternal effects) i...

Ecotourism is a trendy activity that, even if can be responsible with the protection of the environment, produces inevitable negative consequences and impacts in nature. For example, the presence of people hiking could be considered as an increase in predation risk by many animals. The encounter between people and animals could trigger costly antip...

Chemical communication plays an essential role in several social and reproductive behaviors of many animals. In lizards, the main sources of semiochemicals are femoral or pre‐anal gland secretions and feces. In male lizards Psammodromus algirus, there are age‐related differences in the chemical composition of femoral gland secretions and in the rep...

Female Carpetan rock lizards (Iberolacerta cyreni) might assess the quality of males from their chemical signals. Females select areas scent marked by males with secretions containing high proportions of provitamin D to ensure mating with high-quality males. However, an alternative explanation might be that females are not choosing a mate, but that...

Many field studies of ecology or conservation require individual identification of the animals, and for this, several marking techniques have been developed. However, no specific labeling technique has been tested for fossorial reptiles, such as amphisbaenians. We describe the use of Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tags as a long-term labeling...

Many field studies of ecology or conservation require individual identification of the animals, and for this, several marking techniques have been developed. However, no specific labeling technique has been tested for fosso-rial reptiles, such as amphisbaenians. We describe the use of Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tags as a long-term labelin...

Title: Consequences of the individual variation of the chemical signals of the males of the Carpetan lizard (Iberolacerta cyreni) for their reproductive success, the social organization, the females' preferences and the offspring's phenotype In this thesis, we studied the effects on reproductive success, social organization, female's preferences a...

Las señales sexuales dependientes de la condición han sido ampliamente estudiadas en el contexto de la comunicación animal. Muchos de estos estudios asumen que los machos con señales más atractivas serán los que más se reproduzcan, pero esto raramente se ha comprobado. Los machos de la lagartija carpetana (Iberolacerta cyreni) atraen a las hembras...

Males of many species produce chemical signals to attract females to their territories. In some cases, the presence and abundance of some compounds in the chemical signals depend on the availability of particular food resources in the environment. Since females are attracted by males' scents, it would be likely that females were just looking for th...

Los costes de producción de las señales sexuales de los machos, permiten que las hembras las consideren señales honestas indicadoras de la condición y la calidad del macho. En la lagartija carpetana (Iberolacerta cyreni), las características de las señales químicas (secreciones femorales) de los machos constituyen una señal honesta en el contexto d...

Sexual signals that males produce to attract females may be honest if they are costly and dependent on the condition and quality of the male. In the Carpetan rock lizard (Iberolacerta cyreni), the characteristics of males' chemical signals (femoral secretions) may constitute an honest signal in the context of female mate choice. Those males able of...

Las señales sexuales químicas (secreciones femorales) usadas para marcar sustratos por los machos de lagartija carpetana (Iberolacerta cyreni) parecen tener un papel importante en la elección de pareja. Las hembras parecen evaluar la calidad de un macho a partir de las proporciones de dos formas de la provitamina D (cholesta-5,7-dien-3-ol y ergoste...