Table 1.
Information sources for courtship and combat behavior in snakes.
Table 2.
Behavioral characters considered in this study.
Figure 1.
Phylogenetic distributions of behaviors used in male-male combat in snakes, with black boxes representing the recorded presence of a behavior and white boxes representing the absence of a record of the behavior.
See Table 1 for references. On the chart on the right, the heavy horizontal lines separate families and subfamilies. On the cladogram, white circles represent families, gray oblongs represent subfamilies, and the gray square is a tribe. Suprageneric taxonomy follows reference [9]. Taxonomic abbreviations: B = Boidae. b = Boinae. C = Colubridae. c = Colubrinae. cr = Crotalinae. d = Dipsadinae. E = Elapidae. L = Lamprophiidae. l = Lamprophiinae. la = Lampropeltini. n = Natricinae. P = Pythoninae. ps = Psammophiinae. px = Pseudoxyrhophiinae. V = Viperidae. v = Viperinae. For abbreviations of behavioral characters, see Table 2.
Figure 2.
Phylogenetic distributions of behaviors used during courtship and copulation in snakes, with black boxes representing the recorded presence of a behavior in males, gray boxes representing the recorded presence of a behavior only in females, and white boxes representing the absence of a record of the behavior.
See Table 1 for references. See the caption to Figure 1 for abbreviations.
Figure 3.
Scenario for the evolution of male-male combat behavior in snakes, based on data presented in Figure 1.
Figure 4.
Scenario for the evolution of courtship behavior in snakes, based on data presented in Figure 2.