Fights among anoles are fairly common in nature, and we’ve had several previous posts documenting anole fights captured on film (1, 2, 3, 4). A casual browsing of YouTube reveals many more anole fights, mostly between male Anolis carolinensis (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Many of these videos use the Rocky theme music to set the tone. I was really enjoying watching these videos until I got to thinking that some of them might actually be staged. I browsed the comments to see if I could figure out if the fights were staged, but didn’t come up with any definitive proof (in a few cases, I added my own comment asking directly if the fights were staged). However, there are certainly people who have commented that watching these videos has inspired them to raise fighting anoles. What do you think? Do some of these fights look staged to you?
- JMIH 2014: Early Records of Fossil Anolis from the Oligocene and Miocene of Florida, USA - August 13, 2014
- JMIH 2014: Relative Contribution of Genetic and Ecological Factors to Morphological Differentiation in Island Populations of Anolis sagrei - August 7, 2014
- JMIH 2014: The Ultrastructure of Spermatid Development within the Anole, Anolis sagrei - August 5, 2014
thsanger
I would be willing to bet that less effort goes into staging these videos than the amount of effort that goes into taking a single anole natural history photograph.
Rich Glor
Probably true.
Alexis
There are also a lot of staged videos of people feeding live rodents to their pet snakes on youtube, usually set to angry metal music. Frankly, these videos can be pretty disturbing. I would guess that a lot of the anole encounters on youtube are also staged. People can’t seem to resist provoking animals by poking them with a stick, tapping on the glass, or forcing them into close proximity with each other. Is this animal cruelty?
Rich Glor
Staging fights definitely qualifies as cruelty in my view.