These Lizards Are Experts at Rock-Paper-Scissors

Evolutionary stable strategies are cool. If you think if life as a game, and the organisms inside of it as players, then evolutionary stable strategies are like a set of rules to keep a complex system in equilibrium.  Only instead of being written down like Monopoly instructions, these rules are encoded in the organism’s genes.

Male side-blotched lizards have stumbled on such an arrangement. The three color variants of this species’ males–orange, blue, and yellow–all have slightly different behaviors when it comes to finding mates and protecting territory. Just like a game of rock-paper-scissors, each one beats another and can get beat by the third. As a result, the population exists in a natural equilibrium, one that regularly cycles and stabilizes itself… all because of what’s written in their genes!

Enjoy this gorgeous video from Deep Look and learn how it all works! And if you’d like to read up on evolutionary game theory, here’s a nice entry from Wikipedia.