"Stumpies fall into the 'put all your eggs in one basket' scenario — large young, high maternal investment, and high individual survival of the young," she explained. "Maternal investment in each baby is high, but the chances of survival for each baby is also high, due to their large size and independence at birth."
One parental perk of the arduous process is that the father does not have to provide care and the mother stumpy offers very little.
Michael Bull, managing editor of Austral Ecology and associate head researcher in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Flinders University of South Australia, has been studying the behavior and ecology of one population of these lizards for 25 years. He confirmed Munn's account as accurate.
He said the lizards are also choosy as to when they give birth. During drought years, the reptiles often abandon parenthood altogether and "just focus on surviving."
"We think they live for over 50 years, so missing one year of reproduction is not going to make a big difference," Bull said. "In a way, these lizards are like desert plants, relying on occasional good years to provide pulses of new recruits, but then toughing out the bad years in between."
