Two posters presented at last night’s session examined how anoles respond to predators. In one, Lisa Cantwell of the University of Tennessee conducted a laboratory study on A. sagrei in which she played different bird calls to see if they would respond differently to predators versus non-predators. And, indeed they do, as the graph on the left shows–compare in particular panels c and d, showing that the behavior exhibited depended on which bird call they heard. The next step in the research, now underway as Lisa’s doctoral research (this started as an undergrad project!), is to take this work into the field to study free-ranging anoles.
Anoles beware–this guy’s as bad as he looks.
The second project was also the result of undergraduate research, this time Chris Peterson, who presented research conducted at the La Selva Biological Research Station in Costa Rica as part of an OTS course. Chris and a colleague presented the ground dwelling Anolis humilis with either one spider, a prey species, or two spiders, both the prey and another spider that actually–horrors–eats anoles. They wanted to see whether they were less likely to attack the prey spider in the presence of the predatory one and whether the size of the prey influenced the decision to attack in the presence of the predator. Results seemed to confirm these predictions: the anoles were more likely to attack in the absence of the predator, and when they did attack, it was usually in the presence of a larger prey spider (when alone, size of the prey did not influence likelihood to go for it).
One final tangent–note that the title of this poster uses the generic name Norops. Rumors are swirling here in Vancouver that a new paper is about to appear and reignite the battle over anole nomenclature with a new proposal to split Anolis into multiple genera. Stay tuned!
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