Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 4, 2025

Computer-Generated Animal Model Stimuli
Published on: July 29, 2007
Lizard Skin Patterns and the Ising Model
Szabolcs Zakany1,2, Stanislav Smirnov3,4,5, Michel C Milinkovitch1,2
1Department of Genetics and Evolution, University of Geneva, 30 quai Ernest-Ansermet, 1211 Genève, Switzerland.
Abstract:
The ocellated lizard (Timon lepidus) exhibits an intricate skin color pattern made of monochromatic black and green skin scales, whose dynamics of color flipping are known to be well modeled by a stochastic cellular automaton. We show that the late-time probability distribution of the pattern corresponds to the canonical probability distribution of the antiferromagnetic Ising model and can be generated by dynamics different from the commonly-used Glauber. We comment on skin scale patterns generated by the Ising model on the triangular lattice in the low-temperature limit.
Related Concept Videos
Types of Selection
Fixed Action Patterns
Testing a Claim about Mean: Unknown Population SD
Estimating a population mean requires the samples to be approximately normally distributed. The data should be collected from the randomly selected samples having no sampling bias. There is no specific requirement for sample size. But if the sample size is less than 30, and we don't know the population standard deviation, a different approach is used;...

