Y: Hey Don, how many pushups can you do?
D: Uhm . . . I have no idea, Yael. Why?
Y: I'm just wondering if you can do more than a Jacky Dragon.
D: Now I really have no idea. What's a Jacky Dragon?
Y: It's a small Australian lizard.
D: OK. But what do the lizards have to do with pushups?
Y: Well, a lot of animals are territorial, right? And you know how some animals defend their territory by making loud noises or butting heads or fighting . . . Jacky Dragons do pushups.
D: Really?
Y: At least that's what it looks like they're doing. When two male Jacky Dragons square off, one starts the showdown by flicking his tail, then waves his arms back and forth and finally pumps his arms up and down really fast in a push-up like motion.
D: Wow. So is the idea that whichever lizard does the most pushups wins the contest?
Y: Well, it's not clear that the lizards actually count the number of pushups. It has more to do with speed. Doing pushups very quickly is a display of strength . . . a way of saying, "I'm really strong so you'd best not fight me."
D: I see. So it's kind of the art of fighting without actually fighting.
Y: Right. And the pushup behavior is actually pretty common among lizards. But unlike acoustic displays like bird calls and frog croaks, visual displays like lizard pushups haven't been studied very much. So the more we know about how Jacky Dragons and other lizards communicate with their bodies, the more we'll learn about visual displays in general.
