Skip to navigation | Skip to content  Sexual deceit helps lady-
boy lizards mate  The Augrabies Flat Lizard (Platysaurus
broadleyi)  The Augrabies Flat Lizard (Platysaurus broadleyi)
(Source: Martin Whiting)  Young, male lizards desperate to mate,
access women and avoid attack from older males by pretending to
be one of the girls, a new study says.  According to the study
published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, young male
Augrabies flat lizards (Platysaurus broadleyi) hide their
colours so as to imitate plain, brown females.  "In this system
the adult males are extremely colourful and extremely
territorial and the females are a plain brown," says co-author
Associate Professor Scott Keogh, of the School of Biological
Sciences at the Australian National University.  "Young males
purposefully only develop colours on their belly, so they reach
sexual maturity by still looking like a female."  Imitating a
female allows the juvenile lizards to mate with females, without
being detected and driven away by