Brown Anole In Boston

I recently visited the Boston Institute of Contemporary AnolesArt (ICA) and snapped the following picture. Please accept my apologies for the blurriness and my excuse that this was taken with a camera phone from the ICA’s glass elevator while being shuttled to the art installations on the fourth floor of the museum.

On the level second from the bottom, there’s a lizard with clear diamond back pattern on its back, highly reminiscent of females from Anolis sagrei and several other trunk ground anole species.

I’ve captured a part of an approximately three-story piece of nature-themed art, made mostly from cardboard, bamboo, and paper cut-outs, that featured likenesses of animals from across the animal kingdom. It seems that anoles inspired the piece’s numerous lizard cut-outs. In the picture, you can see a lizard that is clearly not geckoid, the usual suspect in this sort of thing. Rather, it has a head shape and diamond back pattern strikingly reminiscent of a female Anolis sagrei. This was the only picture I was able to acquire yet the other lizards in this art piece also had the characteristic brown anole gestalt.

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Yoel Stuart

I am interested in whether, how, and why ecology shapes evolution (and evolution shapes ecology) through time, with an emphasis on microevolutionary pattern and process, adaptation, and field experiments. I completed my Ph.D. on Anolis lizards in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Austin studying threespine stickleback. They're not anoles, but they're cool too.

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