httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVn-JWEcHAg&feature=player_embedded
We talk a lot about how green anoles and brown anoles interact with each other, and the supposition usually is they are competing for space and/or food. But they can interact in another way, by eating each other! And here’s graphic proof that it happens!
The footage is from the classroom science project run by Aaron Reedy, Dan Warner and Tim Mitchell. We featured their recent paper a few months ago, and you can read all about the project on their website.
Professor of Biology and Director of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in Saint Louis. I've spent my entire professional career studying anoles and have discovered that the more I learn about anoles, the more I realize I don't know.
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Ambika Kamath
This is amazing! I would have expected the reverse interaction (A. sagrei eating juvenile A. carolinensis) to be more common, and therefore more likely to be observed.
Philip M. Fortman
Found your Youngzine post for a closer look. http://www.youngzine.org/article/wide-world-science-lizard-project?print=1
That is a lot of brown anole to go inside the green anole! Were you able to observe ingestion? Could this be a territorial defense kill by suffocation?
Martha Muñoz
I had a question similar to Philip’s. I can see that the green is munching on the sagrei, but was this definitely a predation attempt? Did you see the lead up to this moment? Were the two engaged in, say, a territorial defense that ended in a fight and the green maybe caught the brown by the middle rather than the head? Or did the green ambush it?
I was also wondering about body size. We know that anoles can sometimes bite off more than they can chew. Did he ingest the little guy?
Either way, bet that sagrei wishes he’d stayed away that day.
Armando Pou
Excellent documentation! I have seen adult male A. carolinensis eat hatchling segrai & distichus, particularly in the early spring when hatchlings are abundant, but never one that size.
Jo
I am a new resident of FL. I’ve seen larger green (anoles, I think) and smaller brown anoles under my mobile home and around the carport. One day, I saw a green one had the tip of the tail of a brown one in his mouth. (Brown one was about half his size.) I wondered if the green one was trying to eat the brown one. The brown one was trying to get away from him. The brown ran thru a tiny object and when the green one hit the object (that he could not fit thru), he could not hold onto the tail (yea!)
Pam
We have noticed daily battles between green & brown, threatening, stalking, rolling, biting, it’s rough. Usually we break it up or go in; it’s quiet violent. We were told that the brown have invaded this area of MS & are decreasing the green anole population. Regardless, there seems to be a large number of both. There seems to be plenty of bugs to go around, I don’t know a female from a male so I can’t comment on that. Even though we have acreage, they seem to stay close to the house; it could be territorial.