Tweeted by Meet Your Neighbors, who describes itself thusly: Founded in 2009, Meet Your Neighbours is a worldwide photographic initiative created by Niall Benvie and Clay Bolt. The project is dedicated to reconnecting people with the wildlife on their own doorsteps – and enriching their lives in the process. These creatures and plants are vital to people: they represent the first, and for some, the only contact with wild nature we have. Yet too often they are overlooked, undervalued.
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 98 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.
Seems every few months, another journal has the good sense to put an anole on the cover. Most recent: the new journal Ecology and Evolution, which only took 19 issues to get with the program. We’ll be reporting on the article soon, but for now, enjoy the cover, which is another beautiful photograph by Neil Losin. And here’s a montage of all the recent covers…unless I’ve forgotten one.
Grand Prize
Last year we had an Anolis photo contest and produced a 2012 anole calendar. Both were wildly successful. Today, Anole Annals is pleased to announce it is combining both. We herewith announce the 2012 Anole Photo Contest. The goal of the contest is to identify 12 winning photos. 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.
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.
Name that anole. Photographs by Thomas E. Lodge
Tom Lodge of Thomas E. Lodge Ecological Advisors photographed this blue-bellied beauty at Fairchild Tropical Garden, Miami-Dade County, FL, at 10:00am this past Sunday. The lizard is approximately 40-45 mm snout-vent length. Anyone want to take a crack at figuring out what it is? Clearly not A. sagrei. Could it be A. cristatellus, which occurs there? If not, what?
Another look
Anolis fraseri. Photo by pbertner.
We recently had a post on the rediscovery of the horned anole of Ecuador, Anolis proboscis, which is found only in the environs of Mindo, Ecuador. Mindo is a lovely spot whose economy is strongly focused on ecotourism, but in a very rustic, old school way, making it a delightful place to visit, even more so because of its anoles. The horned anole, of course, is the star, but there are several others there as well, such as the crown-giant A. fraseri and the incredibly common A. gemmosus, which can be found sleeping in high numbers, yet is hard to find during the day.
A sleeping gem. Photo by Jonathan Losos
The Tropical Herpetology website has a series of pages on the reptiles and amphibians of Mindo, which includes a list of all species as well as specific pages on some of the species, including A. proboscis, A. fraseri, and A. gemmosus. The site also has wonderful photographs. This is not the first post on the Tropical Herpetology website–we covered their pages on the species at Chical, near the Ecuador-Colombia border, last October. It’s a great site.
From Nathan Watson’s instagram page.
The Evolution meetings are now ended, but the fond memories linger on. Such as Yoel Stuart reporting the results of his study of character displacement in Mosquito Lagoon, Florida. Dredge spoil islands were created about 50 years ago when the area was dredged, producing big piles of sand which were subsequently colonized by plants and, eventually, green anoles. Within the last 10 years, many islands were invaded by brown anoles, but some remained sagrei free. Yoel set out to compare the green anoles on islands with and without brown anoles.
First, though, he demonstrated the islands with and without brown anoles didn’t differ consistently in any environmental parameter. Thus, nature has set up a very good experiment.
Yoel found that green anoles perch higher in the presence of brown anoles, presumably a result of interspecific interactions. Moreover, on brown anole islands, green anoles have better developed toepads. A common garden experiment reveals that these differences are not the result of plasticity. Hence, morphological differences have evolved in a very short time as a result of a habitat shift caused by the presence of another species–an excellent example or rapid evolutionary change and character displacement in action.
Liam Revell, Young Investigator Extraordinaire
Anolis natural selection expert and comparative methods guru Liam Revell was today awarded a prestigious Young Investigators Prize from the American Society of Naturalists. The award recognizes Liam’s pathbreaking work advancing the development of statistical methods that incorporate information on phylogenetic relationships into the study of evolutionary diversification, as well as the work he has done studying the role of natural selection in shaping evolutionary direction in anoles.
Liam’s talk first highlighted the important new directions his research is taking in studying adaptation in urban anole populations, as well as in the evolutionary diversity of Caribbean boas, before focusing on the various methodological and analytical advances he has pioneered.
Many studies find that two populations are extremely genetically differentiated and assume that they are reproductively isolated. Last night, Anthony Geneva reported results of a study that goes the next step, actually testing for the form of reproductive isolation. His focus was on two parapatric members of the Anolis distichus group in Hispaniola that differ in dewlap color and genetically differentiated (see previous talk in this meeting by Julienne Ng). By bringing individuals into the laboratory and conducting a massive breeding experiment, he tested whether they would mate and produce offspring and, if so, whether the offspring were viable. This is an enormous undertaking–something like this has never been done on anoles.
After one generation of the two generation experiment, some results are already clear. Members of the interspecific crosses (based on genetic differentiation, they have been named as different species) will mate–no pre-mating isolation, apparently, despite the different dewlap colors; or at least, not complete isolation. However, the number of inviable eggs is greater in the hybrid crosses. No signs yet of Haldane’s rule of any asymmetric degree of postmating isolation, but more work is yet to come.
Recent years have seen great enthusiasm for the idea that populations experiencing different selective pressures will diverge genetically, perhaps to the point of speciation. Ian Wang examined 17 species of Anolis lizards to determine the extent to which genetic differences between populations were a function of ecological differences in the environments they occupy versus geographic differences. Across all 17 species, geography explained twice as much of the variation as did ecological differences, although patterns varied from one species to another. These results suggest that although adaptation to different environment plays some role in driving genetic differentiation, other factors are equally or more important in most cases.