Lizards do push-ups
A Jacky Dragon, also known as a Tree Dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus), photographed in South-eastern Australia.
(Credit: Benjamint444. Some rights reserved.
See a hi-res version of this image.)
Jacky Dragons are small lizards native to Australia. Male Jacky Dragons have an interesting way of intimidating rivals. They do push-ups.
When a male Jacky Dragon confronts a competitor, he begins the showdown with a flick of his tail, followed by several arm waves and a series of rapid push-ups. Earth & Sky spoke to Daniel Van Dyk, a Ph.D. student at Macquarie University in Australia.
Daniel Van Dyk: By pushing up very very quickly, they’re basically showing how much they can lift – how much power they have – which is clearly important in a fight because they try and bite each other. So knowing how strong your opponent is is going to have a big impact on whether you think you can beat them in a fight or not.
In the lab, Van Dyk created an animated version of a Jacky Dragon, using the same technology used to create movies like Finding Nemo. Then he put a real lizard in front of the animation on a TV monitor. In some cases, the lizard would try to attack the animation. And beforehand, it showed off to the TV with its push-up routine.
These push-ups are the lizard version of guys in a gym, comparing how much they can bench press.
Dragon Wars from Macquarie University News
Daniel Van Dyk also said, “Animals have basically very similar requirements. Territorial animals want to do the same sort of things, and visual displays are using a different sensory modality to try and achieve same thing that birds do with songs and frogs do with calls.”
Our thanks to:
Daniel Van Dyk
Ph.D. student
Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW Australia
In Spanish, one translation of “push-up” is a word with multiple meanings, and the main one is “lizard:”
lagartija
To do push-ups we say hacer lagartijas (to create lizards)
This phenomenon was probably studied before because we use the same word for the animal and for the exercise – in some regions.
Really? So intereing.Maybe it’s better to learn a foreign language,because maybe we can find what we want.In another hand,the idioms are well-founded in a degree.
I thought this was very interesting, too!
Science has apparently just begun to study what the inventors of the Spanish language already knew.
People in earlier times lived closer to nature than we do today.
Deborah
WOW i wana compete against a lizard :
) ;)How much pushups can they do? I ean the record for humans is 10000 something. I wonder who can do more, a lizard or a human?
I am surprised that I have never known lizards can do push-ups as we humans do. Never do we underestimate animals.
i think its pretty cool. I bet i could do more though.
lasagna is good. never mind that, i think this article is very interesting. It gave me great knowledge on lizards.
this is really cool how they do push ups. i wish i was a lizard, it gotta be so cool.
hey, thanks you helped me on my current event project:)
lizards doing push-ups is pretty cool but i think it would be even cooler if lizards could do sit-ups too.