Help with Research Paper!!

[dragonriot]

This Friday I have to turn in the rough draft of a research paper on the differences in behavior of captive and wild bearded dragons. I'm not limited on a specific species of beardie, and I'd actually like to include all 8 known species in the paper. The problem is, I know all there is to know about captive dragons, but nearly nothing at all about their wild behaviors except what I can get from YouTube videos where the recorder is usually tormenting the dragon with a dog or stick, trying to get it to puff up and throw its beard around. I'm looking specifically for cite-able resources and articles about the behavior of wild bearded dragons, and I plan to use a few veterinary-herpetology college websites for the captive sources.

You're my last hope... I've already talked to the Reptile Vet dude in Australia, and he's getting back to me when he finds something, but even in Australia it seems like there really hasn't been much actual research done on wild beardie behavior, only the discoveries that the different species exist.

 

[SkeptiBee]

It doesn't seem like there would be much difference between captive and wild beardies. I ended up finding this on the Australian Museum website. There is some additional references at the bottom you could look into.

http://australianmuseum.net.au/Central-Bearded-Dragon

 

[label]

Have you tried Google Scholar? It's the more serious sibling of Google. I did a quick search for "bearded dragon behavior" and got 17,200 hits. Most of these look pretty off-topic but some relate to courtship, thermoregulation, etc.

A really nice local book on all Aussie dragons is "Guide to Australian Dragons in Captivity", which also has species-specific descriptions of behaviour, habitat, etc. But beardies are only a small part of the contents--we have a lot of dragons here! It's also AUD$65. I'd give Google Scholar a go; it might help to included in your search some of the key behaviours you're interested in.

Good luck!

 

[Derobmi]

I came across this before: http://www.smuggled.com/pogona1.htm which has a nice long list of references cited.

I'd love to see your paper when you're done. I'm very interested in how wild beardies behave and manage.

Mary