DOI: 10.5061/dryad.dv41ns26b
title: Data from: Behavioral threat and appeasement signals take precedence over static colors in lizard contests

description: The interplay between morphological (structures) and behavioral (acts)
 signals in contest assessment is still poorly understood. During contests,
 males of the common wall lizard (Podarcis muralis) display both
 morphological (i.e. static color patches) and behavioral (i.e. raised-body
 display, foot shakes) traits. We set out to evaluate the role of these
 putative signals in determining the outcome and intensity of contests by
 recording agonistic behavior in ten mesocosm enclosures. We find that
 contests are typically won by males with relatively more black coloration,
 which are also more aggressive. However, black coloration does not seem to
 play a role in rival assessment, and behavioral traits are stronger
 predictors of contest outcome and winner aggression than prior experience,
 morphology, and coloration. Contest intensity is mainly driven by
 resource- and self-assessment, with males probably using behavioral threat
 (raised-body displays) and de-escalation signals (foot shakes) to
 communicate their willingness to engage/persist in a fight. Our results
 agree with the view that agonistic signals used during contests are not
 associated with mutual evaluation of developmentally-fixed attributes, and
 instead animals monitor each other to ensure that their motivation is
 matched by their rival. We emphasize the importance of testing the effect
 of signals on receiver behavior and discuss that social recognition in
 territorial species may select receivers to neglect potential
 morphological signals conveying static information on sex, age, or
 intrinsic quality.
description: See main text for details.
description: # Behavioral threat and appeasement signals take precedence over static
 colors in lizard contests
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dv41ns26b](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dv41ns26b) Excel files corresponding to three different datasets including information on agonistic male-male interactions between male wall lizards recorded during the breeding season in ten experimental enclosures. Each Excel file contains a second tab including detailed variable descriptions. ## Description of the data and file structure There are three datasets, with a degree of redundancy to facilitate their use in analyses. The file entitled "contests with contest score3.xslx" contains one row per recorded contest and both individual-level (e.g. static traits) and contest-level (e.g. winning record, expression of behavioral displays) variables. It also includes a metric of contest score obtained by summing up the agonistic behaviors of both contestants (see main text). The file entitled "predictors_dataBehecolBTm3.xslx" contains individual-level predictors of the 90 males released into the enclosures. This separate file is required to fit a Bradley-Terry model with the BradleyTerry2 package in R. The file entitled "potentialContests_3.xslx" has one row for each potential pair of rivals (males released into the same enclosure), including pairs of rivals that were never observed to interact.  All excel files include a second tab with detailed descriptions of each variable and their abbreviations.