The days of self-isolation and quarantine are dragging on as COVID-19 continues its worldwide rampage. We may all be a little less productive than we had thought we would be as we tend to unruly kids and rogue parents who won’t stay indoors. Here at Anole Annals, we’ve scoured our past posts and brainstormed some of our favorite learn-at-home resources to help keep you entertained at home while learning about your favorite lizards!  Whether you’re a seasoned researcher looking for a break, a teacher in search of remote learning activities, or a parent at home with kids in need of educational activities, we hope you find the following resources useful.

 

HHMI BioInteractive

HHMI produced several fantastic videos and learning modules perfect for learning about anoles, ecology, and evolution in the classroom and at home! Each of the activities also comes with handy educator materials to make sure your newly homeschooled students gets the most out of these resources.

The Origin of Species: Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree — This short video (~17 minutes) covers the concepts of adaptation, islands as natural laboratories, speciation, and convergent evolution. Pair the video with the associated interactive activities and discussion prompts to get the most out of this resource. Start with this one, since all of the other activities produced by HHMI relate back to the concepts covered here.

Lizard Evolution Virtual Lab — This all inclusive four part learning module involves videos and an interactive web application (also available for IOS) to learn about ecomorphs, phylogenies, experimental data, and dewlaps. Students will collect and analyze data as they learn about the scientific process and anole themed concepts. The modules also have embedded mini quizzes to make sure your student is understanding the information, and educator materials to help you guide your students as they learn.

The Lone Anole — This activity is a short conversation starter based on a photo of the Plymouth anole (Anolis lividus) to use with students to discuss ideas of adaptation and natural selection.

One of the sample cards for students to “collect data” from in the HHMI  selection by predation activity.

Look Who’s Coming for Dinner: Selection by Predation — In this interactive activity, students are walked through the scientific process to learn how to develop a hypothesis, collect data, and analyze results with plotting and basic statistics. This activity is based on the study: Rapid temporal reversal in predator-driven natural selection (Losos et al. 2006). Everything you need to complete the virtual experiment is included!

Effects of Predation on the Niche of Lizards — This short activity guides students through interpreting a scientific figure from the study: Predation on a common Anolis lizard: can the food- web effects of a devastating predator be reversed? (Schoener, Spiller, and Losos, 2002).

How Lizards Find Their Way Home — This short video (8 minutes) is based on the research of Manuel Leal. Watch a real scientist design an experiment to answer a question and carry out fieldwork radio tracking lizards! Produced by Day’s Edge Productions.

Lizards in the Cold — This short activity based on the study Winter storms drive rapid phenotypic, regulatory, and genomic shifts in the green anole lizard (Campbell-Staton et al. 2017) teaches students how to interpret a scientific figure and is a good conversation starter for discussing natural selection and climate change.

Lizards in Hurricanes — Another short activity based on a study by Donihue et al. (2018): Hurricane-induced selection on the morphology of an island lizard. Students are asked to review a figure from the paper and discuss how hurricanes and other extreme weather events can lead to morphological change, and how scientists can experimentally investigate these changes.

Reproductive Isolation and Speciation in Lizards — This short animated video (~2 minutes) discusses the process of speciation and the role of the dewlap in reproductive isolation in anoles.

Using DNA to Explore Lizard Phylogeny — In this interactive activity students learn how to build a phylogeny based on common traits and then by using DNA sequences to explore the concept of convergent evolution. As with the other activities, everything you need to do this experiment at home is provided digitally.

Day’s Edge Productions

The crew at Day’s Edge Productions have created quite a few high-quality short and long films of your favorite lizards and anole biologists. Professionally produced and featuring some amazing footage, put these on for your kids, your students, your parents… there’s something for everyone to enjoy here!

The Anomalies, Ep. 1: The Dewlap — This 6 minute short demonstrates the diversity and function of the anole dewlap.

The Lizard’s Tale — This 7 part series of shorts (each less than 10 minutes long) take you on a tour of cutting edge anole research. In Episode 1, Meet the Anoles!, you’ll learn about the diversity in anoles and and what makes these lizards unique. Episode 2, Does Evolution Repeat Itself?, explores convergent evolution among the anoles of the Greater Antilles. Episode 3, Anoles in Deep Time, takes a look into the 60 million year history of anoles. Episode 4, The Origin of Anole Species, covers ideas of speciation and natural selection. Episode 5 and Episode 6, Island Test Tubes, dives into the research done on Caribbean islands to observe ecology and evolution in action. Episode 7, Anoles in the City, highlights recent research on anoles in urban environments and how they are adapting to these human-dominated habitats.

Law’s of the Lizard — This award-winning full length documentary first aired on the Smithsonian Channel, but you can catch it on various streaming services now. The Smithsonian Channel also produced a couple of short videos to go along with this film: How Lizards are Turning Our Knowledge of Evolution Upside Down, and Evolution Operates at a Faster Speed Than We Expected.

 

Lizards and Friends

Michelle Johnson (Trinity University) has developed a wealth of teaching resources for students of all ages made available on her site Lizards and Friends. Some of these activities require a live lizard (which some of our readers in the southern US and Caribbean might have access to in their backyards), such as an guided activity to understand how lizards get energy from their food, but other activities only require your creativity and thought, such as this worksheet exploring food webs involving anoles. Also featured on this site is a fun activity developed by Thom Sanger on dewlaps and signaling, which might be difficult to do at home while maintaining social distancing, but could be done safely over video chat with friends or even across the street with your neighbors!

 

iNaturalist

Explore the world around you while contributing to scientific research! On iNaturalist you upload observations of plants and animals around you and the scientific community identifies it for you! For those of you fortunate to have anoles around you at home, no better time than now to contribute an observation or two of the anoles in your backyard. Scientists use these data to do real science and answer questions like which anole species tolerate urbanization or which species take advantage of the night-light-niche. If you don’t have anoles around you, you can also use iNaturalist from your couch to explore the diversity and distribution of different species. Try using the explore observations by map section or search for a specific species. So many topics of conversation to have using this resource!

 

Data Nuggets

Data Nuggets features classroom activities designed by teachers and researchers based on recent scientific research. There’s a few good nuggets based on anole research:

Hold on for your life! (part 1 and part 2) based on the recent study by Colin Donihue and colleagues on morphological change in anoles following hurricanes.

Is it better to be bigger? which guides students through research on natural selection on body size in anoles.

Is it dangerous to be a showoff? asking how dewlaps relate to survival in brown anoles.

 

Other Resources:

We’ve covered a few different classroom activities on here before. Here’s a few of our favorites that might be adapted for home learning:

 

And here’s a few more from various sources:

 

UPDATES:

  • Peter Uetz from Reptile Database had this to add:
    Also, remember that it is a good exercise for students to collect data from the literature, which you can then use for some analyses. It’s even more important to teach students that larger amounts of data are only useful when they are accessible and structured, hence its critical to submit them to some database. The Reptile Database will provide more structured datasets in the near future, so please have your students collect data and send it to us 🙂 (e.g. we have size data for >10,000 reptile species now, although not online yet, but it’s coming).

 

Know of any other great resources? Let us know in the comments or using the form below!

 

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