throat color The throat color of this lizard represents important information about their level of development. Juvenile males will firstly have an orange throat color. Monomorphic males will maintain this orange throat coloration for life, however, polymorphic males will either retain their orange throat color or they will develop a yellow throat color as they mature. The ontogenic color change of the throats for polymorphic males have important social functions. Females and young males with an orange throat coloration inhibits aggression from male adults. Dominant males that develop different throat colors late in their development will typically have blue and blue-green throats. This suggests that these colors are visual indicators of social dominance. Researchers have hypothesized that the different throat colors of these lizards have important social functions. This is because the throat coloration of male ornate tree lizards affects their social relationships. Additionally, since throat coloration is a genetically determined trait, it is possible that the different throat colors seen in polymorphic males during developmental stages are responses to changing social roles, enabled by phenotypic plasticity, as the lizards mature. Additionally, throat coloration is also associated with size. 82% of hatchlings develop an orange throat color within 15 days of hatching and the lizards that had a delayed onset of throat coloration are typically smaller for their age. Therefore, the size of the ornate tree lizard is a better indicator of their throat color than their age. Population structure Urosaurus ornatus has a complicated social hierarchy causing O males and OB males to fight for resources. The social systems that allow for the stability of the lizard population cause a mixed evolutionary stable strategy for the continuation of their genes. In a mixed evolutionarily stable strategy, both morphs pursue different life history strategies that allow them to achieve equal fitness. O and OB males behave differently in different situations, but most times having the OB male be dominant over the O male. While OB males are more dominant socially, O males are usually larger and grow faster than OB males, both in captivity and in the wild. O males will reach a larger size before breeding time, but once both O and OB males reach adulthood they are the same size. Effects of habitat Lizards are ectotherms and because of their temperature dependent lifestyle they may not follow predictions of density‐dependent habitat selection models because temperature strongly influences their