This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

You wouldn't think that studying lizards is a particularly dangerous profession.

Until that is, sheriffs approach you with their guns drawn.

We get the cops caught on us sometimes.

Brie Putman, a behavioral ecologist at UCLA and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

Her colleague at the museum, Greg Polly, really did end up on the

wrong side of a gun once, and here's why. A lot of times we're doing work at night in people's

neighborhoods and we're like using flashlights to look for

geckos on the sides of people's houses and so sometimes people will think we're

criminals or burglars or something. The museum's solution was neon orange shirts with a museum logo.

And we call these shirts the don't shoot me shirt.

But the bright orange left Putman with a concern that the color would spook the very

animals they were trying to study.

So she devised an experiment.

I basically designed the study to show to the museum staff that these shirts were not going to be good for research.

And that's what I found.

In our trials, Putman wore tank tops of various colors, red, gray, light blue, dark blue, and then attempted to approach and capture Western

fence lizards in public and private parkland in LA.

And she found that when wearing dark blue, she could get twice as close to the lizards compared to when she wore red.

And she was about twice as likely to catch a lizard too, while wearing dark or light blue

compared to red or gray. The study appears in the journal Ploss 1.

Putman thinks that the lizards may be more tolerant of blue hues because they most closely resemble the blue patches males have on their bellies, a sexual signal.

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