Amazing social life of the Green iguana!!!

An adult Green iguana in full regalia is a spectacular and beautiful beast. This very red individual (originally from Cuba) was photographed in Florida by Cary Bass, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

It’s still not as well known as it should be that ‘complex’ or ‘sophisticated’ bits of social behaviour are far from limited to mammals and birds among the tetrapods. Lizards, snakes, crocodiles, alligators and even humble frogs, salamanders and caecilians engage in such things as pair-bonding, parental care and kin recognition. Play behaviour (Burghardt et al. 2000), co-operation (Lenz 2004), social nesting, counting, sophisticated learning and problem-solving abilities (Leal & Powell 2011), social learning (Wilkinson et al.2010), and the care and protection of siblings have all now been reported for various lizard, turtle and crocodilian species. Long gone are the days when interesting or ‘complex’ bits of behaviour must be assumed absent in non-mammalian, non-avian tetrapods.