Year: 2012 Page 35 of 47

Fighting carolinensis. Photo from https://twitter.com/#!/tsansmerci/status/183640654881095681/photo/1

Wowie zowie! Check that out. The top carolinensis is holding the other one in mid-air by its jaws. No wonder they have such big heads (female carolinensis heads are much smaller) and such powerful toepads.

Otocryptis wiegmanni. Photo by Akila De Silva from http://lazy-lizard-tales.blogspot.com/2012/01/year-of-dragon-amazing-agamids.html

A while back we had a post discussing the many times lizards have evolved dewlaps, and more recently our mystery lizard was a most anole-like agamid lizard, Sitana ponceriana. Above is a close relative of Sitana, Otocryptis wiegmanni, doing its best anole imitation. Really, someone needs to do a comparative anatomical study of all these dewlaps to see how similar they are in construction–I’m guessing pretty similar!

The photo comes from a cool website, The Lazy Lizard’s Tales, and this particular post is chockful of cool looking agamids

This young Anolis equestris was enjoying the recent bloom of a royal palm here in south Florida. After the freeze in 2010 there was a sharp decline in Anolis equestris (kill rate perhaps as high as 80%). The Iguana iguana population declined by 95% or more (so much for the “invasive invasion”). What has resulted from this die-off is that now I see many more of these young A. equestris. This particular specimen most likely hatched out last spring, there is also a smaller sized batch that must have hatched out in the fall. This staggered series of young animals is something I had not observed previously. Adult Anolis equestris (particularly the males) are notorious cannibals and young equestris are much slower and less agile than A. sagrei, A. porcatus, and A. distichus which often elude the sprinting attacks of equestris.

 There have been a number of citations of equestris eating birds and small rodents. Anolis equestris are opportunistic predators and will undoubtedly take fledglings if possible. I have seen mocking birds chase equestris from trees because they see them as threats, however, their fabled predatory exploits have been largely exaggerated. For nearly forty years I have made numerous field observations of A. equestris in south Florida. What I have found is that they spend their time much like their smaller anolis counterparts snapping up small arthropods. In fact, a fair proportion of their food intake isn’t even animal matter;

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Brown anole from Dust Tracks on the Web

Darwin famously pointed out that a surfeit of cats could lead to an abundance of flowers.  Janson Jones has transplanted that way of thinking to our favorite study organism, arguing that a population burst in green anoles in Florida is due to an influx of little dogs, whose ceaseless yapping and running amok has knocked brown anoles off their game, allowing the greens to proliferate. Read all about it here.

Animals and/or insects have a very weird yet amazing relationship with each other. Most of the time, a species will be wiped out without the other. When we think of our dogs, we often think about getting them the best life they can have, and we end up buying stuff from www.treehousepuppies.com or from our local pet shops. But nature does not operate that way, instead, it lets the animals and insects fend for themselves with the help of others.

And here’s what Darwin had to say:

Humble bees alone visit red clover, as other bees cannot reach the nectar. It has been suggested that moths may fertilise the clovers; but I doubt whether they could do so in the case of the red clover, from their weight not being sufficient to depress the wing petals.

Hence we may infer as highly probable that, if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great measure upon the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Colonel Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that “more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England.”

Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Colonel Newman says, “Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.” Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!