Sociality, stress, and the corpus striatum of the green anolis lizard

The green anolis lizard, Anolis carolinensis, is a uniquely convenient species with great potential for providing insights about the causes and consequences of social behavior from an evolutionary perspective. In this species, social interactions are mediated by visual displays in which specific units of behavior are combined in various ways to communicate several more-or-less specific messages. Two related research programs that utilize this species converge in provocative ways to provide insight into this phenomenon. The first program is centered on the basal ganglia, now known to be crucial to the expression of aggressive territoriality in this species, and the second research program examines the way the physiological stress response is involved in aggression and its subsequent adaptive outcomes. Both the neural and the neuroendocrine systems affect the progress of social interactions as well as the subsequent social dominance relationships when combatants subsequently live together. Further, because body color depends almost exclusively on the stress response, skin color provides a unique in situ bioassay of otherwise inaccessible information about the animal's internal state. The fullest understanding of the physiological ethology of this model species will depend on an interdisciplinary approach that considers both proximate (physiological) and ultimate (evolutionary) causes of displays. Questions thus arising include how the nervous system controls and assembles the specific units of behavior-motor patterns and autonomic reflexes-into displays that are adaptive in specific contexts.