Name That (Enormous) Dewlap

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Rich Glor

The species pictured above has one of the largest dewlaps of any anole, with a ceratobranchial that extends posteriorly well beyond the forelimbs.  What species is it?

Posted in Anole Annals Trivia | 5 Comments

Anoles and the IUCN

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Luke Mahler

Anoles are well-known for a lot of reasons, but conservation is not one of them.  Possibly because of the abundance, hardiness, and visibility of the more common anole species, the group as a whole is often regarded as one that’s doing just fine.  To date, very few specific efforts have been made to assess the conservation status of anole species.*

Anole species vary, of course, in how they’re doing.  Although species such as Anolis cristatellus, cybotes, and limifrons seem to occur on every perch across broad distributions, species like A. fowleri and A. megalopithecus have only been located a handful of times in the wild despite some considerable efforts. Dozens more species are known from just a single locality, where they may or may not be locally abundant.  While a lot of rare or little-known anoles may simply be secretive or geographically restricted, some are very clearly endangered. Continue reading →

Posted in New Research | 5 Comments

Cabela’s Panfish Poles For Lizard Catching: Hope Springs Eternal

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

The Anole Annals community was rocked recently by news that Cabela’s 10-foot, collapsible panfish poles–ideal for anole catching–are no longer available. Panic and pandemonium have ensued, but fear not: all may not be lost. In response to a comment I lodged on their website, I received this response: “We do still carry item number 115800.  You are welcome to go to our web site cabelas.com and search the item number to see if that is what you are looking for.  If not please call our customer service number of 1-800-237-8888 and ask to speak to a products associate who may be able to locate the one we used to carry and help with the manufacturer’s name and number” (I had asked for info to contact the manufacter directly). Melissa Woolley did so and was told that they are listed as backordered and should be available in late April. So, maybe there is still hope. I would like to urge all concerned anolians to go to Cabela’s Customer Service webpage and say something to encourage Cabela’s to restock the panfish pole pronto! https://cabelas.custhelp.com/app/ask

Posted in Research Methods | 3 Comments

Knight anoles in the Bahamas

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

Knight anole from Grand Bahama. Photo courtesy of Daniel Murray.

A population of Anolis equestris has been reported from the island of Grand Bahamas. Specifically near Our Lucaya, living in a stand of dilly trees.

Only A. sagrei is native to Grand Bahama (which is somewhat remarkable given the size of the island), but equestris is the third introduced anole there, following distichus and a green anole (either carolinensis or smaragdinus, but I’m not sure if it is clear which). Is anyone aware of knight anoles elsewhere in the Bahamas? They seem to be getting around the Caribbean, as they have shown up in New Providence in the Bahamas, as well as Grand Cayman and the Turks and Caicos (see Knapp et al. and Powell et al. chapters in book discussed here).  Given their size, they seem an unlikely stow-away, although eggs could be transported in nursery plants. The pet trade has also been implicated as a possibility.

Posted in Introduced Anoles | 1 Comment

Information on Anolis Maynardi (AKA The Little Cayman Green Anolis)

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Pat Shipman

My husband and I are retired professors living part-time on Little Cayman, so we have come to know both A. sagrei and A. maynardi fairly well. Due to the dearth of information on the latter, we’re posting whatever we’ve got in hopes it helps someone or inspires someone. We have one, a large male, who sleeps most night on a ledge on the inside of our screen porch (he comes in a gap under the door). He goes to bed about 5:30-6 and wakes up around 8 am.

the daily cycle

Anolis who sleeps on top of screen door frame

He is very regular in his habits & quite territorial — we watched him chase a smaller green anolis out of his sleeping ledge with much head bobbing and charges and this morning he smacked into another large male who had the affrontery to be sitting on his deck outside the screen porch! The other male either jumped off the deck or moved quickly to be underneath the deck.

We attach a few photos of two maynardi mating yesterday. Total encounter time was about 6 minutes.

Another view of anole sex

 

Both maynardi & sagrei drink from our bird bath regularly & follow me when I water the garden to drink off wet decks or leaves. Continue reading →

Posted in Natural History Observations, Notes from the Field, Uncategorized | Tagged | 9 Comments

Anolis Headlines A Major New Art Exhibit

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

Calling all German-speaking Anole Annals aficionados. Just what the heck does this say? Some Dutch speakers loosely translated this as an announcement of a new art exhibit on sex. Richtig? A German-to-English translation website helpfully translates this as: “Light signals, the correct reputation or Pushups? From a research group from the mountain wildlife shows the state museum of natural history in Stuttgart until May 2012 in the exhibition “sex.” It is also about phenomena such as infidelity or patchwork-families.”

Thanks to Susanne Renner for her eagle eye out for lizards in adverts.

Posted in Anole Art, Literature, and Humor | 3 Comments

Piecing Together The Anole Family Tree: Anole Fossils

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Emma Sherratt

Our knowledge of the evolution of anoles comes primarily from studying living forms and using information about how species are related (phylogenetic trees) to predict how traits such as their head shape have changed over time. Scientists often use this approach because there may be few (or no) actual fossils representing those stages in the evolutionary past. For anoles, this is no exception; the fossil history of our favourite lizards is sparsely recorded. Here I shall give you, Anole Annals readers, a brief overview of what we do know about anole ancestors and what we can learn from studying these fossils.

Fossil hunting history

In the box below I summarise the five papers that have published upon fossils of the genus Anolis.

Continue reading →

Posted in Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Anole Love

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

The management here at Anole Annals feels responsible for putting up an appropriate, anole-themed Valentine Day’s post. Unfortunately, our normally reliable stable of incredibly talented and imaginative authors has not come up with the expected image of an anoline cupid, an anole starstruck with love, or some such, so we’re in a bit of a bind. It’s not too late, creative types–there’s still 5 valentine hours left here in North America!

However, in their absence, we thought a little googling would solve the problem. Typing in “anole love” found only one appropriate, G-rated image, and it came from…Anole Annals (below)! So we settled for the intriguing book cover above, which of course leads to the question: has anyone read this provocative romance novel?

 

read all about it here: http://www.anoleannals.org/2012/01/03/asymmetrical-dewlap-color-in-anolis-lineatus-on-curacao/

Posted in Anole Art, Literature, and Humor | 4 Comments

Science Is More Interesting When You Discover You Were Wrong: The Backstory on the Anole Founder Effect Experiment

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

They thought it was only a three hour tour.

In my career, I have found that the most exciting research is when the results are exactly the opposite of what I had expected. Certainly, it’s nice to show that what you thought was correct, but you really learn something when the opposite occurs–it makes you look at questions in a new way and often leads to new insights. This has happened to me several times, most recently in our experimental study of founder effects in Bahamian anoles.

One of the tiny islands on which the founder effect experiment was conducted. Note the scraggly vegetation. Photo by Jason Kolbe.

Here’s the story: we have been conducting studies on anoles in the Bahamas for quite some time, using tiny islands as experimental test tubes. We had seen island populations wiped out by hurricanes, and we had documented anoles colonizing these islands, so we knew that populations often must be founded by overwater dispersal, probably by one or very few individuals. Given the long-running controversy over the evolutionary significance of founder effects, we had long discussed whether we could create an experimental founder effect, in replicate, to see what would happen. But we never started such an experiment, for a simple reason: suitable islands for our various ecological and evolutionary experiments were in short supply, and this experiment wasn’t a high priority.

Enter Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in short succession in the late summer of 2004. Continue reading →

Posted in New Research | 2 Comments

Happy Darwin Day !

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Ramon E. Martinez-Grimaldo

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Charles Darwin

More about Darwin day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Day

http://www.darwinday.org/

Posted in Anole Art, Literature, and Humor | 2 Comments

It’s Only the Beginning of February, and The Green Anoles Are Already Out and About in Georgia

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

Read all about what they’re up to here.

Posted in Natural History Observations | Leave a comment

The Loss of a Critical Tool in Anole Biology

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Rich Glor

Today marks a sad day in the history of anole biology: the anole hunter’s best friend has just gone out of production.  Before explaining what I mean, I need to provide some additional details for the uninitiated.  Most anoles are caught primarily with a lasso made of dental floss attached to the end of a pole.  We’ve debated the best material for making lassos but haven’t spent much time on the poles (except here).  Although just about anything ranging from a stick to a golf club can be used as a lizard catching pole, the best lizard poles are generally fashioned from fishing rods.  Fishing rods are ideal for lizard catching because they are both light and long.  For many years, the biggest challenge associated with the use of fishing poles was that they can be relatively difficult to transport.  Rods that could telescope out to 12-20′ generally had only three or four segments, meaning that even a fully collapsed rod was 4-5′ long (too long to be easy to travel with or carry around in the field).  This problem was solved a number of years ago when Cabela’s began producing a new line of telescoping panfish rods that could extend from just over a foot to 10-14′ (they’re no longer listed in the Cabela’s catalogue but you can still find prices and product information at some on-line retailers like Yahoo).  If you check out the reviews, you’ll see that people have used these poles for everything from fishing to herping to displaying “worship banners.”  These inexpensive Cabela’s rods have been my primary anole catching tool for over a decade.  I was deeply saddened when I learned today that Cabela’s will no longer be filling orders for their telescopic panfish rods.  We actually placed this order weeks ago and have been told they were on back-order until today, when we were told simply that our order could not be filled and was being cancelled.  I guess we’re going to have to go through and repair all those broken rods we accumulated over the past decade…

 

Posted in Research Methods | 7 Comments

Anoles Will Be Featured in a Harvard Museum of Natural History Talk

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Martha Munoz

Calling all Boston-area anole enthusiasts! This Saturday I will be giving a lecture at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) through their Adult Classes program. I will be giving the first talk in a three-part “Topics in Evolution” series, and my focus will be on explaining Convergent Evolution, Adaptation, and Sexual Selection. We know that anoles are a fantastic model system for each of these topics, so you can expect that they will be prominently featured. I will discuss community convergence in Anolis lizards, provide laboratory exercises using ethanol-preserved specimens, and discuss anoles in the public galleries of the Museum. If you’re broadly interested in anoles and in evolution, this might be a fun event for you!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Working Hard for a Meal

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Bob Powell

Thanks to the former student, who sent me the link.

Posted in Introduced Anoles, Natural History Observations | 3 Comments

Fear of Lizards Revisited

Posted on February 7, 2012 by DavidSteinberg

Previous posts and associated comments have discussed Scoliodentosaurophobia (here and here) and its prevalence in some anole-rich regions of the Caribbean. I’ve noticed similar attitudes in the US Southeast. In fact, a woman in South Carolina once begged me to kill all the “bugs” (juvenile A. carolinensis) in her bedroom because they disgusted her so much. One interesting way to counter this aversion may be through a public celebration and discussion of lizards. Yaihara Fortis Santiago did just this in an article recently published in El Nuevo Dia, which highlights the well-known lizards of Puerto Rico. Although the article focuses mainly on Sphaerodactylus and Saul Nava’s plans to replicate a recent experiment conducted by Duke’s Manuel Leal, you will notice that the featured photograph is not of a sphaero at all … it’s an anole! Still the world’s most beloved lizard.

Anyone else with links to articles about anoles published in their country of origin?

Posted in Anoles and Anolologists in the News | 3 Comments

Anolis Research Stirs Up Evolution-Creationism Controversy

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

On Sunday, the Washington Post published a nice news article covering the recent study on island colonization and adaptation in anoles (pdf now available here). Very quickly, back-and-forth exchanges appeared in the paper’s online comments section, but most of them were debates about evolution vs. creationism/intelligent design, as well as invectives, insults, and ad hominem attacks. The same thing happened when I posted a story on the anole genome and its utility for the study of evolution on a National Geographic news website. Who knew that anole research was so pivotal to the evolution/creationism controversy? Or that it could bring out the worst in so many?

Appended below are the 77 comments that had appeared in the Washington Post by mid-afternoon on Monday.

Your Comments On:

Castaway lizards put evolution to the test

By , Published: February 4

77

Comments

lynnecatlover
12:52 AM EST
Please hope that the little beasts survived and flourished with shorter hind legs, of course !
akuperma1
2/5/2012 4:48 PM EST
So the key to evolution is a superior being manipulating things. From a lizard’s perspective, what’s the difference between a biologist and a diety?
Posted in New Research | 6 Comments

Tales of Notorious Reptile Smugglers

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Rich Glor

Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery by Jennie Erin Smith is a page-turning historical account of the most notorious reptile smugglers in the United States.  Many of the stories in Stolen World are derived from first-hand accounts provided by a core group of old-school smugglers, most notably Hank Molt and Tom Crutchfield.  I was shocked at how open these folks were about their practices, particular given that some of them are still actively collecting, importing, and selling rare reptiles.  Indeed, some of the book’s primary subjects now seem to regret their decision to share so much with Smith (I’ll return to this point later). Continue reading →

Posted in Anole Art, Literature, and Humor, Notes from the Field, Research Methods | 2 Comments

Anole Book Wins Medal from National Academy

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Rich Glor

Congratulations to Anole Annal’s blogger Jonathan Losos on receiving the National Academy of Science’s Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal, which is awarded every four years for “meritorious work in zoology or paleontology published in a three- to five-year period.”  The NAS recognized Losos for his “novel and penetrating evolutionary studies of adaptive radiation in vertebrates,” many of which are summarized in his recent book on anoles.  The Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal‘s list of previous recipients reads like a who’s who of prominent 20th century ecologists and evolutionary biologists, and includes the man who coined the term adaptive radiation (Henry Fairfield Osborn ’29) and several of the main architects of the modern synthesis (Dobzhansky ’41, G. G. Simpson ’44 & 65, Sewall Wright ’45, and Ernst Mayr ’67).  The fact that the medal is the size of dinner plate has not deterred Losos from wearing it daily.

Posted in Anoles and Anolologists in the News | 6 Comments

A Yellow Knight Anole

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

Photo courtesy Paul Richards

Paul Richards and Kirsten Nicholson found this unusual knight anole while conducting their radio-tracking study on this magnificent species. Richards recalls: “I think we found him on the west edge of the “microbiome” of the Gifford Arboretum. I recall showing it to a well known herpetologist who claimed it was a temporary color change, so we held it overnight. It looked identical in the morning and we released it. I honestly can not remember if we bead tagged it or not (that would be stupid but…). We never saw that individual again, but I also cannot recall how far into the study we were, so our regular searches could have ended soon after. Local lizard fanciers have told me they have seen these color morphs before, so it is apparently somewhat common.”

Posted in Natural History Observations | 3 Comments

Castaway Lizards: Experimental Studies of Lizard Colonization and Founder Effects

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Jonathan Losos

Duke University Press Release. Check out the cool video!

In 2004, Hurricane Francis wiped out all Caribbean lizards found on the keys near the Bahamas.

Seeing an opportunity to study evolution, Duke biologist Manuel Leal and his colleagues took lizards from a larger, nearby island, paired them up and then put the couples on seven of the small keys.

The scientists came back year after year to check on their experiment.

They observed the lizards’ legs getting shorter over time. But, the lizards’ legs did not all shorten to the same size, a hint of the founder effect, where traits from a founding species persist after years of adaptation. It is one of the rare times scientists have seen this phenomenon in nature.

The first results of the experiment were published in a Feb. 2 Science Express article.

You can read more about the study here. And how’s this for a newspaper article title: “Lowly lizards settle ‘founder effect’ theory“?

Citation: “Founder Effects Persist Despite Adaptive Differentiation: A Field Experiment with Lizards.” J.J. Kolbe, J.B. Losos, M. Leal, T.W. Schoener and D.A. Spiller. Science Express. Feb. 2012.

Posted in New Research | 6 Comments