A rock, a paper, a scissors, a bunch of lizards

Hannah Fry, in this Numberphile video, tots up the cases of rock-paper-scissors mathematics as applied to lizards:

This goes back, more or less, to a sex study published in the year 2000:

“Polygyny, mate-guarding, and posthumous fertilization as alternative male mating strategies,” Kelly R. Zamudio and Barry Sinervo, PNAS, 2000 97 (26) 14427-14432.

Here’s a photo of rock-paper-scissors/lizards researcher Kelly Zamudio, of Cornell University, sitting on a pile of sand with a colleague: