Author: Jonathan Losos Page 63 of 133

We all know that some of our favorite anole species are abundant in urban settings, yet many others are not. Why is this? Do species have to evolve and adapt to city living? Maybe not. In what may be a surprising preliminary analysis, Kristin Winchell over on her blog Adaptability suggests that Caribbean anoles ancestrally had what it takes to live in human settings, and not being able to do so is an evolutionarily derived trait. Sounds crazy at first, right? Until you remember that anoles colonized these islands over water, and so to be successful, had to be flexible and able to cope with whatever life through at them–including, apparently, concrete sidewalks, trashcans, cars, and cats. Check out the details on Kristin’s post.

A while back, we noted that “apparently no one has posted a picture of an anole sitting on an orchid on the internet.” Recently, alert reader Tsjok De Clercq has discovered that this is no longer true. He has pointed us to an image on The Orchid Source  that shows a festive anole (A. sagrei) on what appears to be a houseplant. Of greater interest is the post on Ricardo’s Blog, Orchids, Parrots, Fish and People describing a Puerto Rican crested anole found in nature on a red orchid, which seemed to be a complete fail in the remaining cryptic department. Thanks for the tip, Tsjok!

The tweet-o-sphere is full of news that there was some sort of anole question on Jeopardy late last week, and that apparently none of the contestants got the answer. But I can’t find any specific online. Does anyone have the inside skinny?

Forget to get yourself a calendar over the holidays? Or embarrassed when someone gave you a present and you didn’t have one to reciprocate? Fear not, there’s still time to get an Anole Annals 2014 calendar, at bargain basement prices. Act now!!! Offer expires midnight tomorrow (Jan. 4). Go here, use code

LOOKSGOODONU

This is not Anolis roosevelti. No pictures of that species in life exist. But it probably looked pretty similar to this brown-phase Anolis cuvieri. Photo by Alejandro Sanchez.

Anolis roosevelti, the giant anole of Culebra and Vieques, is famous in anole circles. The only Caribbean species thought to possibly be extinct, the species has not been seen since 1932.

Recently I learned of a report of an expedition to Culebra to track down the wily saurian, written by noted author and mycologist Lawrence Millman. As you’ll see, the expedition was a success, but perhaps not in the way you expect.

A Hunt for the T. rex of Anole Lizards: A Trip to Puerto Rico in Search of a Giant Shrinking Reptile.

Christian Science Monitor, July 12, 2007

“Not too long ago I picked up an old travel book about Puerto Rico and read of a rare giant lizard, Anolis roosevelti, on the island of Culebra.
“Fame will visit anyone who finds this elusive creature,” the author of the book proclaimed. Since Fame had thus far given me a rather wide berth, I hopped a plane to San Juan and then a smaller plane to Culebra.
By the time I arrived on the island, the lizard had shrunk. The book had described it as four feet long, but the local Fish and Wildlife person told me that it was no more than a foot long from snout to vent – hardly competition for a T. rex. Still, A. roosevelti is a T. rex compared with other anoles, which are among the smallest of all lizards.
I also learned that this giant among anoles had not been sighted since 1932. Not officially sighted, that is. But there were anecdotal reports of it being seen in the forested areas on Monte Resaca, Culebra’s highest summit (height: 650 feet), as recently as a few years ago.
So I drove to the base of Monte Resaca and started bushwhacking.
Trusting in serendipity, I expected to see the anole in question basking on every boulder as well as ascending every gumbo-limbo tree. I was so intent on my search that I lost all sense of direction and ended up in someone’s backyard.
A Culebran tending his garden looked up at me in surprise. My usual ploy when I trespass like this is to advance confidently toward the person, shake his hand, and announce in a punctilious English accent: “Dr. Basil Withers of the British Antarctic Survey. Jolly good to meet you, old chap.”
Since this ploy would not work in the subtropics, I said, “Hello, Señor. Seen any big lagartos around here lately?”
“Sí,” the man replied. “All the time.”
“What’s their habitat?” I asked excitedly.
“In my bathroom,” he answered. He invited me in, where I saw the lagartos skittering around on the wall. They were geckos, not anoles, and they weren’t even all that big.
Serendipity had gotten me nowhere, so I got in touch with Beverly Macintyre, who knew the island’s backcountry intimately. She mentioned a particular boulder canyon on Monte Resaca, just the sort of place, she said, where a giant anole might hang out. Then she referred to recent development on Culebra; if it continued at its current breakneck pace, she said, a lot more creatures than A. roosevelti would be either endangered or extinct.
In our search for the lizard, Beverly and I entered not so much the forest primeval as the forest prickly. Ground-hugging cacti jabbed us, mesquite bushes stabbed us, saw-toothed bromeliads slashed at us, and a plant known locally as Fire Man (Tragia volubilis) delivered stings that make the stings of a stinging nettle seem positively genteel.
And to add to it, at one point I was gazing up at what turned out to be a green tree iguana and walked into a barbed wire fence.
We did not see a giant anole. We did not even see one of the small anoles that reputedly were common on the island. But near the end of our trek, we did witness this unusual sight: a man on a horse with reins in one hand and a cellphone in the other.
The next morning, as I took a respite from my search, I began noticing other curious sights. A sign in a shop window in Dewey, the island’s only town, said: “Open Some Days, Closed Others.” A road sign indicated Termina Carretera (End of Road) when, in fact, the road did not end at all.
And in the afternoon, I was sitting on Flamenco Beach when a person in an old-fashioned diving bell emerged from the sea. At the north end of the beach, there was a tank left over from the days when the US Navy used Culebra for war games; in this setting, it had a very surreal quality.
I began to think that I had fetched up on some sort of Caribbean fantasy island – an ideal habitat for, among other things, an incredible shrinking lizard.
Several days later, I still hadn’t found the anole in question. My trip was coming to an end, so I asked Teresa Tallevast, the manager of the Culebra National Wildlife Refuge, if there was any area I might have overlooked. She suggested that I check out the trail that wound down from Monte Resaca to Playa Resaca.
Soon I was hiking on this steep trail. Every once in a while I would stop and peer into the surrounding bush. At one point I thought I saw a finned reptilian tail disappear into a tangle of mesquite, but that could have been my imagination … or another iguana.
At the bottom, the trail meandered through a labyrinth of white mangroves. I looked up at the trees’ gnarled branches and then down at their arching prop roots.
Still no anole.
At last I came out on Playa Resaca, a long, yellow swath of sand where I was the only person in sight. The sun was blisteringly hot, but I didn’t go for a swim. Resaca means undertow in Spanish, and if I had gone swimming, I might have washed ashore on the west coast of Africa or, at the very least, in the Virgin Islands.
Suddenly I saw what appeared to be the tread marks of an 18-wheeler in the sand. I was outraged. But then I realized that the tread marks were actually the flipper imprints of a female leatherback turtle who’d plodded ashore the night before to lay her eggs. Weighing a thousand pounds or more, such creatures are the reptilian equivalent of giant rigs; unlike those rigs, however, leatherbacks are an endangered species. I counted myself extremely fortunate to see even the tracks of one.
And so it was that my quest for a rare reptile on Culebra ended in success.”

Photo by Janson Jones

Who wouldn’t delight in a passel of festive anoles, frolicking around in mid-December? Janson Jones, a raconteur if there ever was, certainly knows how to live for the moment. Check out his latest saurian musings on Dust Tracks on the Web.

“Dear Blair, of course you are right, but the scale is all wrong. Predictability of course within a constrained design and clade of close relatives as in your example. My contingency is at the much higher level of designs themselves.”

Blair Hedges recently sent me the image on the left with the following explanation:

“I was preparing a lecture for my evolution class and came across this reply from Steve Gould to me many years ago (Oct 1986), on a post-it note!

I can’t find my original letter to him but I recall it well.   As a grad student, I heard him give a lecture about the Cambrian Explosion where he claimed that evolution operated differently –contingency instead of adaptation or predictability– at the higher level of animal designs.  I told him I disagreed because I was seeing too much predictability in the adaptive radiations on Caribbean islands to believe that it was not happening throughout life at all levels.

Translation of his reply:  “Dear Blair, of course you are right, but the scale is all wrong. Predictability of course within a constrained design and clade of close relatives as in your example.  My contingency is at the much higher level of designs themselves.”

Not sure how you feel about it, but I still don’t agree with his explanation!  500 mya the Cambrian explosion was just an adaptive radiation like anoles.”

Interestingly, this story jibes very closely with a story of my own. In 1998, a number of colleagues and I published a paper in Science reporting a phylogenetic analysis of Caribbean anoles demonstrating convergent evolution of the anole ecomorphs. A reporter for Science contacted me and in the ensuing discussion, I suggested that an interesting person to contact to get an opinion of the paper would be Stephen Jay Gould. I was quite disappointed when her piece appeared and had no quote from Gould. When I subsequently talked to her, I was astounded to learn that she had, indeed, talked to Gould and he had given a reply pretty much exactly the same as on the post-it above. And…she had decided no one would be interested in what S.J. Gould had to say about replicated, convergent adaptive radiation, and so she didn’t include the quote in her article.