Fig.1) Left: Anolis bimaculatus male (top) and A. leachii male (below) for comparison. Right: adult male A. leachii x A. bimaculatus hybrid.
We all know examples of interspecific hybrids in animals such as the Liger, the Zhorse or the Calico Chuckwalla or even intergeneric hybrids in plants such as orchids. Even within Anolis, there are well known examples of interspecific hybrids such as Anolis aenus x Anolis trinitatis on Trinidad.
I was able to produce fertile hybrids of different members of the bimaculatus group in my breeding facility which I want to show you in this post.
I am a private reptile keeper and breeder and have been working with Lesser Antillean Anolis, mainly in the sense of keeping and breeding, for 20 years. About three years ago, a good friend of mine told me his A. oculatus and A. terraealtae, which he kept together in a small greenhouse, had interbred and produced offspring. This was amazing to me, as I thought they were genetically too far apart. Shortly after that, out of interest and curiosity, I paired up some different species of my collection with the aim to produce hybrids. I was interested if it is possible to interbreed them in general, and also I wanted to see what the hybrids would look like. So in 2020, I paired up …
1) a male A. marmoratus marmoratus with a female A. ferreus
2) a male A. leachii with a female A. bimaculatus
In both cases, I used a large adult male and a young adult female that was raised single and had never been with any other Anolis before. I introduced the female into the male‘s enclosure and in both cases the male started courting the female immediately and mated with her. After the copulation, I separated the female again and collected the eggs over the course oft he next months. Long story short: I was able to obtain viable hybrids, raise some of them to maturity, paired this F1 generation again and produce viable F2 hybrids.
To describe the hybrids, I would say that they are generally very much intermediate in size and color regarding their parent species, both in males and females. But just look at some of the results (above and below):
Fig.2) Left: Anolis bimaculatus female (top) and A. leachii female (below) for comparison. Right: adult female A. leachii x A. bimaculatus hybrid.
Fig.3) Left: Anolis marmoratus marmoratus male (top) and A. ferreus male (below) for comparison. Right: adult male A. m. marmoratus x A. ferreus hybrid.
Now, I have some thoughts about this. We know that genomes diverge in isolation until the accumulated differences result in “speciation“ and/or reproductive isolation, as it is the case with the Anolis in the Lesser Antilles. With the use of molecular clocks such as the cytochrome b mitochondrial gene and geological dates, we can measure the genetic distance and estimate the timespan of separation of these taxa and project their phylogenetic relationships.
But how genetically distant or how long or over how many generations do two species have to be isolated to be genetically incompatible in the sense of not only being recognized as separate species by us, but also not being able to reproduce? Could Anolis be used as a model group for a question like that in general? Which would be the most distantly related Anolis species that would possibly be able to reproduce? Is there any specific pairing that would be of special interest?
Short disclaimer: None of the hybrids will return into nature. They live a healthy and fulfilled captive life like any other captive Anolis. They are just fine and healthy. Please do not blame me for this project.
I recently observed one of my female green anoles swallowing a freshly laid egg, which I suspect came from the other female in the harem. I looked online to see if this behavior is common in green anoles and I was unable to find any information about it. It seems that this exceptional behavior has yet to be reported. I am not sure why my lizard did this.
Considering that my anoles have access to ample resources, including fruit baby food and plenty of gut-loaded crickets and mealworms, I do not believe that her behavior was prompted by a nutritional deficiency. Perhaps it is a novel form of intraspecific maternal competition. Maybe it is unique to mating in captivity. Or maybe this behavior is unique to this particular female — she does eat a lot, and rather indiscriminately. It is also worth mentioning that she is the comparatively larger and more dominant female out of the two.
I am curious to know if anyone else has witnessed this sort of behavior in green anoles, or if they have any ideas about why she did it. Luckily, I was able to catch some of it on video with my cellphone (please excuse the quality and my shaky hands!) just before she swallowed the egg in its entirety.
Recently, a friend found the anole pictured above in Mompiche, Ecuador. As of now, the identity of this anole remains unknown.
The closest matches I could find were Anolis bombiceps and A. lyra, but there were problems with both of those species. Anolis bombiceps lacks a spot on the dewlap, and is not known to occur as far west as Mompiche.On the other hand, Anolis lyra seemingly has either a red or white dewlap without any blue coloration. This individual seems to match up perfectly with A. lyra in all other regards.
This may simply be an individual displaying unusual dewlap coloration, but I’m interested in hearing your thoughts (Editor’s note: AA‘s comment function is broken, so please use the form below).
Thanks in advance!
EDITOR’S UPDATE: SEVERAL READERS WROTE BELLA TO SAY THAT THIS IS A FEMALE A. LYRA. NOTE THE DIFFERENCE IN COLOR OF THE DEWLAP IN BELLA’S PHOTOS AND THE ONES IN A PREVIOUS POST ON ANOLE DEWLAP SEXUAL DICHROMATISM.
On a December 2018 trip to Cuba, we found several species we had difficulty identifying, but a few really have us stumped… I’m hoping your community of experts can help!
For example, the faint lateral striping in this first pic is confusing us. Is this simply a young sagrei?
I found these two specimens in my farm located in the municipality of Santa Sofia, department of Boyacá, Colombia. The living specimen was found near a stream in a wet area, while the dead specimen was found in the house of the farm. The farm is located in an Andean forest at about 2300 meters above sea level where plants such as oaks and eucalyptus trees predominate, among others.
History is rich with great rivalries; David versus Goliath, Red Sox versus Yankees, Alien versus Predator, but one of the greatest match ups of our time is anole lizards versus gecko lizards. For readers of this blog that are unfamiliar, for which I assume there are few, geckos and anoles are well matched competitors because of their morphological and ecological similarities. Geckos (infraorder Gekkota) are the earliest branch on the squamate tree (sister to all other lizards and snakes) with over 1500 species around the globe, whereas anoles (genus Anolis) appeared roughly 150 million year after the origin of geckos (nested within the Iguania infraorder). The roughly 400 species of anoles can be found primarily in Central and South America. Geckos and anoles both independently evolved very similar hairy adhesive toe pads that help them adhere to and navigate vertical and inverted surfaces. While anoles can likely trace their toe pads to a single origin (and one loss in A. onca), toe pads likely arose and were lost multiple times within Gekkota, although we are still sorting out the exact details (Gamble et al., 2017). Nearly all anoles are arboreal and diurnal, with only a handful of terrestrial or rock dwelling species. Conversely, geckos can be found thriving in arboreal as well as rocky and terrestrial microhabitats day and night.
While anoles tend to get all of the attention from evolutionary ecologists, with decades of amazing research quantifying their habitat use in the Caribbean, geckos are actually older, with more ecological and morphological diversity. As my prior PhD advisor Luke Harmon can surely confirm, I have been interested in knowing how or if insights from Caribbean anole ecomorphology can be applied to geckos. How similar is the evolution and diversification of geckos and anoles? Do geckos partition their habitat along similar dimensions as Caribbean anoles?
In this post, I’d like to share some of my previous work comparing and contrasting gecko and anole diversification and habitat use and then solicit information and opinions from the anole community for an upcoming field trip in which we will be looking at habitat use of sympatric introduced geckos and anoles.
Fig 1. Our reconstruction of gecko (blue) and anole (green) ancestral toe pad performance based on our best fitting weak OU model of trait evolution. Horizontal bars below the X-axis represent the region in which we constrained the origin of toe pads for each clade. Detachment angle (y-axis) represents our measure toe pad performance (the maximum ratio of adhesion and friction a species can generate). The generation of more adhesion for a given amount of friction results in a higher detachment angle. Shaded bands represent our estimated OU optimum value for each clade. Figure modified from Hagey et al. (2017b).
In 2017, we had two great papers come out investigating the diversification of toe pad adhesive performance in geckos and anoles, and the ecomorphology of Queensland geckos. In our diversification paper (Hagey et al., 2017b), we found that while geckos are an older and larger group than anoles, their toe pad performance does not appear to be evolving towards a single evolutionary optimum. Instead, we found that Brownian motion with a trend (or a very weak Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model) best modeled our data, suggesting geckos have been slowly evolving more and more diverse performance capabilities since their origin approximately 200 million years ago (Fig 1). These results assume a single evolutionary origin of Gekkota toe pads, which was supported by our ancestral state reconstructions, but ancestral state reconstructions are far from a perfect way to infer the history of a trait. And so for now, the true history of the gecko toe pad’s origin(s) remains a ‘sticky’ issue. Conversely, adhesive performance in anoles appears to be pinned to a single optima in which anoles quickly reached after their split from their padless sister group (i.e. a strong Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model, Fig 1).
Given these results and the fact that geckos are such a morphologically diverse group, living on multiple continents in many different microhabitats, our results suggest the adhesive performance of geckos may be tracking multiple optima, and when pad-bearing geckos are considered together as a single large group, could produce the general drifting pattern we observed when we assume their ancestor started without little to very poor adhesive capabilities. On the flip side, we can imagine multiple reasons why anoles appear to be limited in their toe pad performance. Perhaps anoles lack the genetic diversity to produce more variable toe pads or they are mechanically or developmentally constrained to a limited area of performance space. Alternatively, since anoles are nearly all arboreal and diurnal in new world tropical environments, it is possible that they are all succeeding in the same adaptive zone and there isn’t the evolutionary pressure or opportunity to evolve more diverse performance capabilities. Closer studies of the adhesive performance capabilities of the few anoles species that have branched out from arboreal microhabitats, such as the rock dwelling aquatic species would be really interesting!
Fig 2. Our gecko and anole residual limb length calculations suggest geckos (grey triangles) generally have shorter limbs then anoles (black circles). Figure modified from Hagey et al. (2017a).
In our second paper from 2017 (Hagey et al., 2017a), we quantified microhabitat use and limb lengths of geckos across Queensland, Australia and compared these patterns to those known from Caribbean anoles. We found some interesting differences and similarities. Our first result arose as we tried to calculate residual limb lengths and realized that geckos, as a group, have shorter limbs than anoles, which resulted in us calculating residual limb lengths for geckos and anoles separately (Fig 2). We then compared microhabitat use and limb length patterns and found that Strophurus geckos may be similar to grass-bush anoles. Both groups have long limbs for their body lengths and use narrow perches close to the ground. We also found other general similarities such as large bodied canopy dwelling crown-giant anoles and large bodied canopy dwelling Pseudothecadactylus geckos. Unfortunately, we didn’t focus on sympatric Australian geckos and so we couldn’t make direct habitat partitioning comparisons to anoles. We hope to fix that in our next project and would really love to hear from you, the anole community.
Later this spring, I am planning a fieldtrip with John Phillips and Eben Gering, both fellow researchers here at Michigan State University, to Hawai’i (Kaua’i and O’ahu) to investigate habitat partitioning of invasive geckos and anoles, specifically A. carolinensis, A. sagrei, and Phelsuma laticauda. Jonathan Losos one claimed that Phelsuma are honorary anoles! These three species are all diurnal, arboreal, have adhesive toe pads, and are commonly seen in Hawai’i and so we expect them to be competing for perch space. This has been on some of the greatest anole minds since at least 2011 with Jonathan wondering which group would win when the two clades collide in the Pacific. Previous studies of anole ecomorphs across the Greater Antilles and invasive A. sageri in the southeastern US give us a good expectation of how the trunk-crown A. carolinensis and the trunk dwelling A. sagrei should interact and partition their arboreal microhabitat, with A. sagrei pushing A. carolinensis up the trunk. The wild card is P. laticauda. There hasn’t been much microhabitat use work done with Malagasy geckos, and definitely nothing compared to the extensive work with Caribbean anoles. As a result, I don’t know much about exactly what part of the arboreal environment P. laticauda uses in its natural range or how it will fit in with its new pad-bearing brethren in Hawai’i. The best information we have to my knowledge is a study of other arboreal Phelsuma by Luke Harmon in Mauritius (Harmon et al., 2007). He found that while the Phelsuma geckos of Mauritius also partition their arboreal habitat by perch height and somewhat by diameter, they also partition by palm-like or non-palm-like perches. I’m not aware of any anole observations suggesting a palm/non-palm axis of partitioning and so this may be a novel axis that P. laticauda is using in Hawai’i to live in amongst the anoles.
Anoles, geckos, and Hawai’i have come up repeatedly here on Anole Annals
and so we know folks have been thinking about these species and specifically this invasive set of species for a while. We are especially excited to see Amber Wright’s research suggesting P. laticauda was perching above A. carolinensis in her enclosures. We want to know what the anole community has to say. We also don’t want to duplicate or intrude on any projects that are already under way.. If this is something you’ve already started, or started to wonder about… let us know! We would love to collaborate, partitioning interesting questions, if there are already labs working in this arena. We would also be grateful for suggestions, field site recommendations, or relevant publications we may have missed.
Hello everyone. I recently spent four months in the Yucatan Peninsula, doing field work at the Punta Laguna Spider Monkey Sanctuary. While I was there, I observed and photographed quite a few Anolis. I suspect that they are a mix of A. sagrei, rodriguezi, and lemurinus, but I am not able to definitively identify them on my own. I am well aware that it may not be possible to put a name to some or maybe even most of these from photos, but I would be grateful for any insight from the resident experts.
Here are the photos, in no particular order.
This should be A. sagre, correct?
And these yellow dewlaps I would imagine indicate A. rodriguezi?
Hello to everybody, I’m an italian naturalist that visited Cuba last December 2016.
I’m mainly a birder, but I like to give a name to all the creatures I meet. So, I’m going to post 20 pictures of lizards photographed in Cuba: for some I have hypotheses about the identification, but I need confirmation. For some others, I’m completely lost! Can anybody help me??
My students and I spent a few weeks in the southwestern portion of the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica this past summer, mostly working on frog projects. However, it is hard not to get interested in the anoles too! We found several individuals in our stay that we could not readily key out in Savage (2002). They were found in in secondary rain forests along small streams. Sorry, no dewlap photos. Any help from the experts on the identity of these beasts would be appreciated!
Here’s another individual from the same study site that is perhaps the same species:
Here are a pair of anoles photographed by Mitchell Robinson in Jacmel, Haiti. He is looking for help identifying them, and where better to look for such help than Anole Annals?
We have ideas about the IDs, but would like to hear from you experts before imposing any potential bias. Thanks for any help!