Kinematics of Prey Processing in Lizards

Two models have been proposed to potentially explain the feeding kinematics of lizards. Each model predicts that lizards will engage in multiple prey processing behaviors and that the prey transport behavior will consist of at least 3 different phases (slow opening, fast opening, fast closing). The critical difference between these models is the presence or absence of a slow opening II phase of the gape cycle. This talk will describe a simple method of objectively and empirically distinguishing changes in the gape cycle curve so that one can easily determine where one phase of the gape cycle ends and another begins. This method, and its application to kinematic data, will be reviewed and applied to a broad comparative study of lizard feeding kinematics in which the presence or absence of the SOII phase was explored.