Anthony Herrel, Rosario Castañeda and I are just back from a three-week trip to Colombia and Venezuela to collect data on the natural history of several little-known anole species. Unbeknownst to us, we were retracing the work of Harvard graduate student and naturalist extraordinaire Ken Miyata, who conducted similar—though more extensive, fieldwork on two of our focal species—A. (Phenacosaurus) heterodermus and A. onca in the 1970’s.
Fortunately, our South American colleagues were more knowledgeable than we are and pointed us to contributions in Anolis Newsletter II and III in which Miyata and Ross Kiester detailed their work and findings, which, alas, were never formally published. I’ll be reporting on what we saw, both here and in the Scientist at Work blog of the New York Times (first post this morning), but if you want to get up to speed, check out these reports. And, more generally, this indicates the wealth of important information available in the Anolis Newsletters, all six of which are available.
Lastly, a teaser: we’ll be hearing more about Ken Miyata in the next few months.
I knew Ken well. He was a great biologist and explorer. Too bad he loved to go fishing in unsafe situations! Looking forward to reading more….