ZOOLOGY Zoology 111 (2008) 37–47 Wide home ranges for widely foraging lizards Dave Verwaijen à , Raoul Van Damme Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, Universiteitsplein 1, 2610 Wilrijk, Belgium Received 2 August 2006; received in revised form 29 March 2007; accepted 24 April 2007 Abstract Space usage by animals may be influenced by a range of factors. In this study we investigate whether foraging behaviour affects the home range size of lizards. Two distinct tactics of foraging have been recognized in predators: sit- and-wait foraging (SW) and active foraging (AF). Foraging activity level of a data set of lizard species, mainly compiled from literature, is compared with their home range sizes. Two opposite predictions can be made about foraging in connection with home range area: on the one hand, SW species may exhibit larger home ranges due to their mating system; on the other hand, AF species have higher metabolic energy and thus food requirements and can be expected to have larger home ranges that have to yield this food. This study shows that percentage of the time moving (as an index of foraging mode) correlates positively with home range, even after correcting for body mass, and these patterns remain when phylogenetic relationships are taken into account. We thus conclude that home range areas parallel activity levels in lizards. r 2007 Published by Elsevier GmbH. Keywords: Home range size; Foraging mode; Sit-and-wait foraging; Active foraging Introduction Lizard home ranges (HRs) The HR is the area that is crossed by an individual animal during its activities in normal circumstances and that has to satisfy its requirements, including: food (Schoener, 1968; Waser and Homewood, 1979), shelter (Stamps, 1983a), suitable thermal conditions (Christian et al., 1984) and mates (Owen-Smith, 1977; Stamps, 1983b). Energetic requirements have always been central in the attempt to rationalize HR size (McNab, 1963; Harestad and Bunnell, 1979; Mace et al., 1983; Reiss, 1988). Energetic needs in turn vary with body mass according to some allometric power law (Mace and Harvey, 1983). HR size is further influenced by the density of available food (McNab, 1963; Mace and Harvey, 1983), and thus by the diet of an animal. Animal prey is generally a scarce food resource compared to fruit or foliage. An herbivore is therefore able to satisfy its energy requirements by exploiting a smaller area than a carnivore of similar size (Schoener, 1968; Harestad and Bunnell, 1979). Within trophic levels, HR size might further be influenced by foraging style (Harestad and Bunnell, 1979; Mysterud et al., 2001). This may actually go with differences in the distribution of specific food items (Mysterud et al., 2001). In this study, the relationship between foraging mode and HR area will be investigated among lizard species. Lizards have been fairly popular as model systems in ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.de/zool 0944-2006/$ - see front matter r 2007 Published by Elsevier GmbH. doi:10.1016/j.zool.2007.04.001 à Corresponding author. Tel.: +32 3 820 22 60; fax: +32 3 820 22 71. E-mail address: dave.verwaijen@ua.ac.be (D. Verwaijen).