Reproduction, Diet, and Sexual Dimorphism in Micrablepharus Atticolus (Squamata, Gymnophthalmidae) in Cerrado Enclaves Within Brazilian Amazon Forest
Autecology studies provide essential information on species’ life history and natural history, improving our knowledge of evolutionary processes vital for effective biodiversity conservation. Herein, we describe the autecology of Micrablepharus atticolus with emphasis on morphometry, diet, and reproduction. We collected specimens from two municipalities (186 km apart) within the state of Rondônia, Brazil, during the dry season (between July and September). M. atticolus showed sexual dimorphism in body size and shape. As observed in other gymnophthalmids, females were larger (size dimorphism) and longer, whereas males had larger heads (shape dimorphism). Additionally, males from our study sites had relatively long hind limbs when compared to females. The most important (average of percent numeric, volumetric, and frequency) prey categories were Araneae, Blattodea, and Orthoptera, corresponding to more than 80% of the total prey number. Females had a fixed clutch size of two with more than one clutch per reproductive season. Egg volume was positively correlated to snout-vent length, which might contribute to the sexual dimorphism observed where relatively large females produce relatively large eggs and, therefore, larger offspring. All adult individuals were reproductively active, suggesting high reproductive activity during the dry season. Reproduction in the dry season can be related to the species’ dependence on solar incidence to court and copulate. It can also be related to higher availability of oviposition sites, which are limited during extended periods of rain, especially for egg-burrowing species.Abstract
Accuracy of the Guided Regularized Random Forests (GRRF) model in explaining body shape of males and females of Micrablepharus atticolus, based on Correct Classification Rate (CCR; percentage of classification of observations that the model in its observed class classified) and Kappa (values of Kappa between 0.41 and 0.60 are considered with moderate concordance between the model and the actual dataset, between 0.61 and 0.80 are considered substantial concordance, and above 0.80 are almost perfect concordance), for each iteration (number of trees of the forest generated by GRRF).
Importance of body shape variables: Snout-vent length (SVL), head length (HL), body width (BW), hindlimb length (HLL), head height (HH), body height (BH), head width (HW), , forelimb length (FLL), and tail length (TL) in sex morphometrics of Micrablepharus maximiliani based on mean decrease in Gini impurity (MeanDecreaseGini). Higher values indicate higher importance in explaining differences between sexes.
Accuracy of the Guided Regularized Random Forests (GRRF) model based on Correct Classification Rate (CCR) and Kappa (a measure utilized to observe accuracy of predictive models) according to the number of body shape variables (from 4 to 9) in Micrablepharus maximiliani to differentiate body shape between males and females.
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