To some degree, I am playing Devil’s advocate in supporting the split of Anolis – but I do think there are valid arguments that need to be considered.

There are a number of assumptions that, if proven to be false, weaken my argument:

    1. As a clade, anoles are older than the KT boundary – 65 million years. The estimates from Nicholson et al. are much older than that, but if you were to choose a date where splitting up vertebrate genera might make sense, 65 million years is not unreasonable. It is likely that coalescent methods will make the estimated age of anoles younger than the 95 million years in the paper, but I’m going to guess older than 65 million years. You may feel that clade ages are irrelevant, but I’m willing to bet that most people would have some age that they would say is too old for any genus (500 million years?)
    2. The Alfoldi et al. (2011) tree is pretty accurate and the following aspects of that tree will remain after adding taxa and more data. Starting with the Norops clade or genus (see below for a discussion of why Norops), there are 8 very well supported clades (black dots on the Supplemental figure). There are very short branches between 4 of those groups, representing a rapid radiation such that only 3 of 7 possible inter-group relationships are well supported. Anolis lucius and  A. argenteolis were left in Anolis by Nicholson et al. because A. argenteolis represents the biggest conflict between mtDNA and nuclear DNA and is placed with high confidence with the Anolis clade in Alfodi et al. – I assume that the nuclear tree represents the correct placement of that species.
    3. If Anolis is split up, the usage of the word “anole” would increase and refer to all 8 genera to a degree that would minimize workers not knowing that these 8 genera are monophyletic.

One narrative that needs to be considered (see Rich Glor’s excellent post on the history) is that the impetus to split Anolis comes from those who have primarily worked in Central and South America, where the two most disparate (by time) clades of anoles co-exist. If there are non-systematists working on anoles on the mainland it would be useful if they recognized the deep split between two clades of species now in the same genus, especially if clade names fail to be used outside of those whose focus is phylogentic trees. The problem has been that if Dactyloa and Norops are used on the mainland, then a bunch of other generic names are needed for the Caribbean species that fall between the two genera on the tree, with 8 being the minimum number of very well supported groups (again with an assumption that the nuclear DNA framework is robust).  To split Norops further might lose the great story of the reinvasion of the mainland from the Caribbean (Nicholson et al., 2005). From the perspective of those working on the mainland, 8 is a logical minimum number. Given the lack of resolution between the 8 groups, 8 clades is more information than 1 and not much is lost going to 8.

It is important to ask what workers on mainland anoles other than Nicholson et al. think about splitting Anolis. What does Laurie Vitt think, for example?

Another aspect of genera that hasn’t been touched on yet is morphological dissimilarity. Although there is no agreed upon (or necessary) level of dissimilarity needed to recognize a genus, my personal feeling is that if two species are in separate genera, it should not be difficult to tell them apart as species.  I think that this is one reason that I am opposed to the excessive splitting of Bufo and Rana that have been proposed. (To really make this a really good argument, I would need to find some specific cases where the new Frost et al. 2006 genera are difficult to tell apart as species – I’m just assuming that this is true –). In any case, Anolis is not like Bufo – the species are distinct and there is plenty of morphological variation. Long before molecular phylogenies, workers on Anolis, knew (or at least strongly suspected) that ecomorphs were not monophyletic. This does not necessitate splitting Anolis, but it distinguishes it from other cases that may be oversplit.

It seems very likely, (particularly on the mainland) that some workers will use the revised taxonomy and some will not, leading to an increase in the mixture of name usage.

Unlike others, I don’t think that this fragmentation in usage is necessarily horrible because it will force anyone who works on this clade to consider phylogenetic relationships and to be cautious about applying any methods that blindly consider genera to be equivalent in any way (this includes any meta-analyses of squamates that use genera as a unit of measure).

In conclusion, even if I’m playing devil’s advocate to some degree, I have a real concern about the best way to encourage the use of phylogenetic information outside of research that is focused solely on taxonomy and the phylogenetic history itself.

KIRSTEN E. NICHOLSON, BRIAN I. CROTHER, CRAIG GUYER & JAY M. SAVAGE (2012). It is time for a new classification of anoles (Squamata: Dactyloidae). Zootaxa, 3477, 1-108

Nicholson, K.E., Glor, R.E., Kolbe, J.J., Larson, A., Hedges, S.B. & Losos, J.B. (2005) Mainland colonization by island lizards. Journal of Biogeography, 32, 929–938.