Photo by Piotr Naskrecki from thesmaller majority.com
World class photographer Piotr Naskrecki has a blog, The Smaller Majority, in which he writes about little beasties. Recently he featured the aquatic anoles of Costa Rica. Most notably, he includes some excellent photos of an aquatic anole eating a freshly caught aquatic insect, slightly surprising as some reports are that Central American aquatic anoles only use the water to escape predators. Here’s his description of what he observed:
Photo by Piotr Naskrecki
“The actual capture of the insect happened under water, and thus I did not see the very moment of the catch. These roaches (a still undescribed species) live in the sand and under submerged rocks of fast flowing streams, and dive and stay under water at the slightest disturbance. The anole gave several chases to the insects, in all cases running after them underwater on submerged sides of boulders or logs, but in only one case I was able to photograph it as it emerged with an insect in its mouth (attached [editor’s note: to the left] is a photo of the lizard taken a second or two after it emerged from under water).
The location was a stream nr. Est. Pitilla in Guanacaste, CR (photo of the habitat attached), the coordinates are 10°59’26”N, 85°25’40”W; the observations were made May 27th, 2007.”
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Justin Sponholz
Thanks for this!! I just learned of aquatic anoles over the last few years, there’s very little info about them.
Skip Lazell
Isn’t there at least one on Hispaniola? Seems to I caught them in distant youth….
Martha Munoz
Hi Skip,
Yes there is! Anolis eugenegrahami is found in Haiti. Rich Glor and Luke Mahler found some a few years ago during an expedition. It’s not a common species for even the most seasoned anolologists to have seen – I’m jealous you got to see them.
Best,
Martha
Yoel Stuart
If it was catching prey under water, I wonder how they do it?
Suction feeding in Anolis?
Or maybe they have an Alien-like pharyngeal jaw to manipulate the prey? http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/eeb/mehta/ElverHome.htm
Then again, I suppose they mostly just catch the prey underwater and then come up on land to use the usual the inertial feeding mechanism, as the lizard pictured above seems to be doing.