Introduction - Bruce Jayne is part of a team of snake researchers led by Prof Harold Voris of teh Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, and hosted by the RMBR for research on mangrove snakes in Singapore in early 2001.

Bruce is attempting to understand the evolution of complex systems that involve a combination of behavior, physiology and morphology, using a comparative, functional and experimental approach combined with an ecological perspective to study evolutionary adaptation. Most of his research has been on different aspects of locomotion and muscle function in snakes, fishes and, most recently, lizards. Major methods used in are the quantitative analysis of both motion (from high-speed video images) and in vivo patterns of muscle activity (from electromyography).

Synopsis: Performance is how effectively an animal accomplishes a particular task and is likely to be the intermediary through which natural selection can act on morphological and physiological traits. The locomotion of lizards has been a model system for laboratory tests of organismal performance, but observations on the locomotion of lizards in their natural habitat are lacking.

Thus, I conducted laboratory trials to determine the maximal running speeds of lizards under standardized conditions and then integrated this information with observations of animals in their natural habitat. Two major goals were to determine how frequently maximal physiological capacities are used in nature and how the structure of the habitat might affect locomotor behavior.

I studied the Mojave fringe-toed lizard in a desert sand dune system in the southwestern United States for two reasons. The soft surface of the sand preserves footprints of the lizards which allows the speeds and paths of the animals to be determined. In addition, the habitat structure of the sand dune surface is sufficiently simple so that it was possible to quantify major features of the habitat stucture and relate them to the speed and path choice of the lizards.