DOI: 10.5061/dryad.dncjsxm5f
title: Data from: Vomeronasal organ volume increases with body size and is dissociated with loss of a visual signal in Sceloporus lizards

description: Many organisms communicate using signals in different sensory modalities
 (multicomponent or multimodal). When one signal or component is lost over
 evolutionary time, it may be indicative of changes in other
 characteristics of the signaling system, including the sensory organs used
 to perceive and process signals. Sceloporus lizards predominantly use
 chemical and visual signals to communicate, yet some species have lost the
 ancestral ventral color patch used in male-male agonistic interactions and
 exhibit increased chemosensory behavior. Here, we asked whether
 evolutionary loss of this sexual signal is associated with larger
 vomeronasal organ (VNO) volumes (an organ that detects chemical scents)
 compared to species that have retained the color patch. We measured VNO
 coronal section areas of 7–8 adult males from each of
 11 Sceloporus species (4 that lost and 7 that retained the color
 patch), estimated sensory and total epithelium volume, and compared
 volumes using phylogenetic ANCOVA, controlling for body size. Contrary to
 expectations, we found that species retaining the ventral patch had
 similar relative VNO volumes as did species that have lost the ancestral
 patch, and that body size explains VNO epithelium volume. Visual signal
 loss may be sufficiently compensated for by increased chemosensory
 behavior, and the allometric pattern may indicate sensory system
 trade-offs for large-bodied species.
description: All details regarding data collection and preprocessing can be
 found in the associated manuscript.
description: # Data from: Vomeronasal organ volume increases with body size and is
 dissociated with loss of a visual signal in *Sceloporus* lizards
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dncjsxm5f](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dncjsxm5f) Dataset (.csv file) includes body size (snout-vent length) measures for each individual lizard, as well as estimates of vomeronasal organ sensory and total epithelium volumes for each individual. Species names are included, and individuals are also identified as colorful-bellied or white-bellied. The '.tre' file includes the phylogeny used for PANCOVA analyses. ## Description of the data and file structure Column labels: * Species Species name belonging to genus *Sceloporus* * Idnum Unique identification code for an individual lizard * SVL Snout-vent length measured in mm * Sensvol Vomeronasal sensory epithelium volume in cubic mm * Totvol Vomeronasal total epithelium volume in cubic mm * Color 1 = white-bellied (no ventral sexual signal), 0 = colorful-bellied (ventral sexual signal present) Pruned phylogeny for 11 *Sceloporus* species based on Leaché et al.’s (2016) phylogeny, and inferred ancestral states for belly color as in Ossip-Drahos et al. (2016). We made the tree ultrametric using the Grafen (1989) computation of branch lengths as implemented by the compute.brlen function in the ‘ape’ package in R Statistical Software. We also include the coronal section images for every individual used in this study. Folder names represent the individual as indicated in the '.csv' file (corresponding species included). **References:** * Grafen, A. 1989. The phylogenetic regression. *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B, Biological Sciences* **326**: 119–157. * Leaché, A.D., Banbury, B.L., Linkem, C.W. & de Oca, A.N.M. 2016. Phylogenomics of a rapid radiation: is chromosomal evolution linked to increased diversification in north american spiny lizards (Genus *Sceloporus*)? *BMC Evolutionary Biology* **16**: 63. * Ossip-Drahos, A.G., Oyola Morales, J.R., Vital-García, C., Zúñiga-Vega, J.J., Hews, D.K. & Martins, E.P. 2016. Shaping communicative colour signals over evolutionary time. *Royal Society Open Science* **3**: 160728. * R Core Team. 2021. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.