AA reader, anole scientist, and anole breeder Veronika Holáňová has written a beautiful book on anole husbandry. I can attest that the photos are exquisite, and here’s what she has to say about it: “It is a book for all Anolis lovers who would like to try to keep them in captivity. In that book I have my experiences with keeping different anole species after many years :-).” The only catch is that it is in Czech, though Veronika says that “maybe one day it could be in English too.” Let’s hope! The book has a nice webpage from which it can be ordered.
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 94 of 133
Professor of Biology and Director of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in Saint Louis. I've spent my entire professional career studying anoles and have discovered that the more I learn about anoles, the more I realize I don't know.
Karen Cusick, author of Lizards on the Fence, writes Daffodil’s Photo Blog, on which she daily chronicles in photographs the nature goings-on in her backyard. And these goings on often feature green and brown anoles, which go about their business and interact with each other on her back fence. Included are some lovely shots of displaying, eating, fighting, and more. Worth a look.
The post from a week ago Friday, August 24th, reports an encounter between a female A. carolinensis and a small A. sagrei. We’ve had a number of previous posts on AA about carolinensis-sagrei interactions and I think it’s still an open question how often the two species are actively aggressive to each other. In this light, Karen’s observations were interesting, and she has provided some photos. Here’s her report:
Figure from Leal and Powell paper showing that members of the same ecomorph category are not convergent in brain structure.
The Caribbean anole radiation is famous for its convergence. First detected in features related to habitat use and locomotion, such as limb length and toepad size, we now know that the Greater Antillean ecomorphs are convergent in many other attributes such as sexual dimorphism, territory structure and head shape. One might wonder what other features are convergent as well. For example, brains. The anole ecomorphs differ in the complexity of the environments in which they live, which might lead to selection for different brain configurations in different habitats. Brian Powell set out to examine anole brains for his just completed doctoral dissertation at Duke University, and he has now published the results. The short story: the anole ecomorphs are not convergent in brain structure! You can read more details in Chipojolab’s first-hand account of this paper, or check out the paper’s abstract here:
A while back, we had discussion of a photo of a beautiful turquoise Anolis grahami. Here’s a much better photo that just popped up on Instagram. I’d love to see one of these in life. Joe Burgess says they’re from the Hellshire Hills area of south central Jamaica.
This, of course, is not the only time that blue color has evolved in anoles. I wonder what drives it. I’m told that the shockingly blue A. gorgonae on Gorgona Island is surprisingly cryptic in the shaded canopy.
And while we’re on the topic of beautifully blue A. grahami, it turns out that this species has just been featured on The Featured Creature (thanks to AA reader and Duke University anole wrangler Maria Campano for pointing this out). Enjoy the lovely photo below and check out the full story over there.
More photos and story at http://www.thefeaturedcreature.com/2012/08/mystery-solved-most-beautiful-anole.html?showComment=1346442604552#c1991819277006706898
Photo by Karen Cusick.
That’s how big. This little gal is probably just out of the egg. Thanks to Karen Cusick, author of Lizards on a Fence, for the photo.
Or, for another take on the same topic, check out Dust Tracks on the Web‘s latest offering.
From Dust Tracks on the Web
The New York Times covered the story, too. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/08/08/blogs/cat/cat-blog480.jpg
We reported earlier this month on the talk at the Ecological Society of America where a University of Georgia researcher put kitty cams on housecats to see where they went and what they did. And one finding: they caught a lot of anoles! USA Today ran an article on the front page, and included a video online that has some grisly (ok, not that grisly) footage of this, as well as other cool stuff (encounters with other animals, secret lives of housecats). Check it out!
The guys at Day’s Edge Productions have wrapped up their expedition to Spanish Islands in quest of colorful and highly variable lacertid lizards. They’ve posted their swan song of a video, which reveals extraordinary differences in color in populations literally right next to each other. As always with this team, worth watching.
And while we’re on the topic of great lizard videos by Day’s Edge, here’s a wonderful one on the introduced anoles of Miami and Neil Losin’s doctoral work. Though made more than a year ago, for some reason, it seems to have just made it’s way to Youtube, which is reason enough to pop it up here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsLDPwdX748&feature=g-high-lik
Grand Prize
Just a reminder about this year’s photo contest. Last year we had an Anolis photo contest and produced a 2012 anole calendar. Both were wildly successful. This year, Anole Annals is is combining the two with the 2012 Anole Photo Contest. The grand prize winner will have her/his photo featured on the front cover of the 2013 Anole Annals calendar and will receive an autographed copy of Karen Cusick’s lovely book, Lizards on the Fence. The second place winner will receive a copy of the calendar and have her/his photo featured on the backcover of the calendar. We’ve already got a number of good entries, but the judges feel that there’s still a chance that new entries can rise to the top. So don’t delay–submit today!
This year’s calendar. Put your photo on the cover of next year’s version!
The rules: please submit photos as attachments to anoleannals@gmail.com. To ensure that submissions with large attachments arrive, it’s a good idea to send an accompanying e-mail without any attachments that seeks confirmation of the photos receipt. Photos must be at least 150 dpi and print to a size of 11 x 17 inches. If you do not have experience resizing and color-correcting your images, the simplest thing to do is to submit the raw image files produced by your digital camera (or, for the luddites, a high quality digital scan of a printed image). If you elect to alter your own images, don’t forget that its always better to resize than to resample. Images with watermarks or other digital alterations that extend beyond color correction, sharpening and other basic editing will not be accepted. We are not going to deal with formal copyright law and ask only your permission to use your image for the calendar and related content on Anole Annals. We, in turn, agree that your images will never be used without attribution and that we will not profit financially from their use (nobody is going to make any money from the sale of these calendars because they’ll be available directly from the vendor).
Please provide a short description of the photo that includes: (1) the species name, (2) the location where the photo was taken, and (3) any other relevant information. Twelve winning photos will be selected by readers of Anole Annals from a set of 28 finalists chosen by the editors of Anole Annals. The grand prize winning and runner-up photos will be chosen by a panel of anole photography experts. Deadline for submission is September 30, 2012.
One of the brown anole males in the McMann and Paterson study. Photo by Stephen McMann.
Anole Annals readers know otherwise, but many people consider lizards to be simpletons, with nary a thought in their head. But that’s mistaken–it’s salamanders that are the truly stupid ones (sorry for the tangential ad hominem). Lizards have more going on upstairs than people realize. Sure, they’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but they’re no dummies, either.
Case in point: lizards are able to recognize and differentiate among other lizards. This conclusion, which has now been demonstrated a number of times, was reinforced by a recent paper by McMann and Paterson in Herpetological Conservation and Biology. They set out to test whether brown anoles react differently when confronted with a neighbor than when confronted with a lizard that lives farther away and that, presumably, the lizard has not interacted with in the past. This is a test of the phenomenon termed “dear enemy,” the idea that neighbors get to know each other and come to a mutual coexistence in which, when they encounter each other, they go through perfunctory displays, but don’ t get all riled up, because they’ve already been through all of that before. The dear enemy phenomenon has been demonstrated previously in a variety of other lizards. Indeed, these authors have demonstrated it before with brown anoles, but that work was conducted in experimental arenas. This time, the authors wanted to see what happened when the research was conducted in nature, in animals’ own territories. To do this, they presented territorial males with another lizard enclosed within a small cage.
We’re just wrapping up a few last posts from last week’s World Congress of Herpetology in Vancouver. In a tour de force, Laura Rubio-Rocha presented two posters, side-by-side, in the first night’s session. We’ve already discussed her doctoral work on geographic variation in adaptation to different climates in A. carolinensis; here I briefly mention her poster on a high elevation Colombian anole that exhibits year-round reproduction in an environment in which there are two rainy seasons. This interesting study was recently published; you can learn more about it in our previous post on that paper.