Intrinsic traits, social context, local environment, and home range size and fidelity data from a field study of sleepy lizards, 2009 - 2017

Home ranges, the region within which animals interact with their environment, constitute a fundamental aspect of their ecology. Home range (HR) sizes and locations commonly reflect costs and benefits associated with diverse social, biotic and abiotic factors. Less is known, however, about how these factors affect intra-specific variation in HR size or fidelity (the individual’s tendency to maintain the same HR location over time), or if variation in these features emerge from consistent differences among individuals or among the sites they occupy. To address this gap we used an extensive GPS-tracking dataset of a long-lived lizard, the sleepy lizard (Tiliqua rugosa) that included repeated observations of multiple individuals across years. We tested how three categories of predictors: 1) lizard characteristics (sex, aggressiveness, and parasitic tick counts), 2) environmental characteristics (precipitation, food, and refuge quality), and 3) social conditions (conspecific overlap and numb...