Group living often requires strong levels of communication between individuals. This communication is usually studied in the context of visual or auditory communication. However, chemical communication is the most widely used form of communication. We examined the role of chemical communication in mediating social decisions in a group‐living lizard, Egernia stokesii. Specifically, we examined the extent to which scat‐piling, a behaviour by which individuals deposit scat in a communal area, affected the refuge choice of individual E. stokesii . To achieve this, we examined individual refuge choice in response to scat piles or single scats and against two types of scat stimuli, one being their own scat and the other being scat belonging to an unrelated and unfamiliar conspecific. We show that lizards behave differently when presented with a scat pile compared with a single scat, and whether the scat stimulus was their own or sourced from an unfamiliar conspecific. When scats were in piles, individuals spent more time inspecting, more time in, and more often chose the treatment refuge as their final refuge choice, at a trial’s end, when the treatment was their own scat compared with when the treatment was the refuge with the unfamiliar scat. In contrast, for individual scat treatments, individuals spent more time inspecting and more often ended up in the treatment refuge with an unfamiliar scat compared with when the treatment was their own scat. These results suggest that individuals are responding to information contained within multiple components of the scats - both their volume and their source. These results have implications for understanding how social aggregations are maintained within squamates, where sociality has evolved independently from other vertebrate lineages.

中文翻译：

---

家门口的粪便：群居蜥蜴的避难选择受粪便堆的影响

集体生活通常需要个人之间的高度沟通。这种交流通常是在视觉或听觉交流的背景下研究的。然而，化学通讯是最广泛使用的通讯形式。我们研究了化学传播在介导群居蜥蜴 Egernia stokesii 的社会决策中的作用。具体来说，我们研究了粪便堆积（一种个人在公共区域存放粪便的行为）影响个体 E. stokesii 的避难选择的程度。为实现这一目标，我们检查了个人避难选择以应对粪便堆或单一粪便以及两种类型的粪便刺激，一种是他们自己的粪便，另一种是属于不相关和不熟悉的同种的粪便。我们表明，与单个粪便相比，蜥蜴在出现粪便堆时的行为不同，以及粪便刺激是它们自己的还是来自不熟悉的同种动物。当粪便成堆时，个体花更多的时间检查、更多的时间并且更多地选择治疗避难所作为他们最终的避难选择，在试验结束时，当治疗是他们自己的粪便时，与治疗是与治疗的避难所相比陌生的粪便。相比之下，对于个人粪便治疗，与治疗是他们自己的粪便相比，个人花费更多时间检查并且更经常以不熟悉的粪便结束治疗避难所。这些结果表明，个体正在对粪便的多个组成部分中包含的信息做出反应——包括它们的数量和来源。