Gonzalo Rodríguez-RuizSpanish National Research Council | CSIC · Departamento de Ecología Evolutiva - MNCN
Gonzalo Rodríguez-Ruiz
PhD
About
28
Publications
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62
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Publications
Publications (28)
To understand wildlife responses to the changing environment, it is useful to examine their physiological responses and particularly their endocrine status. Here, we validated an enzyme immunoassay (EIA) to non-invasively quantify fecal corticosterone metabolites (FCM) in the fossorial amphisbaenian reptile Trogonophis wiegmanni from North Africa....
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...
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...
Projects
Project (1)
The main objective of this project is to analyze how the chemosensory ability to detect and identify chemical stimuli from the environment and chemical signals from conspecifics can allow fossorial reptiles (amphisbaenians) to cope with their ecological demands in the subterranean environment, and how these abilities influence the health state and the degree of conservation of the populations.
