I am an Assistant Professor of Biology at New York University. My first love is herpetology, but my lab works on urban evolutionary ecology in diverse organisms (but primarily anoles!).
The egg tooth is a hatching adaptation, characteristic of all squamates. In brown anole embryos, the first tooth that starts differentiating is the egg tooth. It develops from a single tooth germ and, similar to the regular dentition of all the other vertebrates, the differentiating egg tooth of the brown anole passes through classic morphological and developmental stages named according to the shape of the dental epithelium: epithelial thickening, dental lamina, tooth bud, cap and bell stages. The differentiating egg tooth consists of three parts: the enamel organ, hard tissues and dental pulp. Shortly before hatching, the egg tooth connects with the premaxilla. Attachment tissue of the egg tooth does not undergo mineralization, which makes it different from the other teeth of most squamates. After hatching, odontoclasts are involved in resorption of the egg tooth’s remains. This study shows that the brown anole egg tooth does not completely conform to previous reports describing iguanomorph egg teeth and reveals a need to investigate its development in the context of squamate phylogeny.
In it’s 10+ years of existence, Anole Annals has united the anole community, becoming your one-stop-shop for information on everything Anolis. It seems to me that the site has lived up to Jonathan’s vision, although he will tell you it can still get better. I for one regularly peruse old posts when I start on a new project. For example, just last month I read up on the anoles of Guadeloupe before visiting the island for the first time and was blown away at the amount of quality information on the blog. It’s function as a repository of information and a go-to source for everything Anolis is something I think is highly valuable to the anole community. And so now, to keep it going, we are looking to you, our readers and contributors.
As time has gone on we’ve added new types of posts and have had a rotating roster of unofficial editors pulling the strings behind the scenes. As we look to the future of Anole Annals, we realize that we need a long-term plan to keep this thing running and up to our high standards. For this reason, we have come up with developing a formal “Board of Editors” for Anole Annals. Many of the positions we envision are jobs some of you are already doing (with little recognition!). We hope you will join on formally so our readers know who to thank for all the hard work you do. For some of the other positions we have thought up, we will need new volunteers! Here’s a brief rundown of the positions. If any sound interesting to you, send us an email or leave a comment!
Social Media Manager(s)1-2 people — The Social Media Manager(s) will be in charge of the Twitter and Facebook accounts to share latest blog posts. (Twitter is currently managed by James Stroud).
Technology Manager1 person — The Technology Editor will help keep the inner workings of this site up to date, implement new functions and pages, and keep the blog running . We run on a custom WordPress platform.
Recent Literature Editor1 person — The Recent Literature Editor is responsible for sharing new anole literature as it comes out. This involves posting the title and abstract of the paper when it comes out (or a list on a weekly or monthly basis) with a link to the paper and reaching out to the authors to ask if they would like to summarize their paper in a blog post.
Conference Editors 3+ people — The Conference Editors will be in charge of planning, recruiting, and scheduling summary posts of conference talks and posters. We mainly cover Evolution, JMIH, and SICB and would welcome a single editor for all three or one for each (and are open to other conferences too!). (Currently conferences are managed by Kristin Winchell, Anthony Gilbert, and Chris Thawley).
Contributing Editor4+ people — Contributing Editors will be responsible for generating content and for recruiting posts from contributors. Depending on the number of editors, we will determine a schedule of post frequency to make sure we have high-quality content posted regularly. Contributing Editors will also proofread / QC posts and schedule them.
Managing Editors 2 people — The Managing Editors will pull the strings behind the scenes. QC and scheduling posts, recruiting new contributors and posts, and generally making sure Anole Annals continues to produce high-quality content on a regular basis. (Currently Jonathan Losos is the Managing Editor, with help from various Losos lab members).
Now’s your chance to get in on shaping the future of Anole Annals! We can’t keep it going in the long-term without your help. Please contact Jonathan or Kristin if you are interested in being a part of our Board of Editors and we will be in touch.
There are many compelling examples of molecular convergence at individual genes. However, the prevalence and the relative importance of adaptive genome-wide convergence remain largely unknown. Many recent works have reported striking examples of excess genome-wide convergence, but some of these studies have been called into question because of the use of inappropriate null models. Here, we sequenced and compared the genomes of 12 species of anole lizards that have independently converged on suites of adaptive behavioral and morphological traits. Despite extensive searches for a genome-wide signature of molecular convergence, we found no evidence supporting molecular convergence at specific amino acids either at individual genes or at genome-wide comparisons; we also uncovered no evidence supporting an excess of adaptive convergence in the rates of amino acid substitutions within genes. Our findings indicate that comprehensive phenotypic convergence is not mirrored at genome-wide protein-coding levels in anoles, and therefore, that adaptive phenotypic convergence is likely not constrained by the evolution of many specific protein sequences or structures.
Anole Annals has undergone some big changes in the past year. We rolled out a new look and are working on adding new functionality to the site, including a meet the scientists page. As the anole community grows, we’re finding it harder and harder to keep up!
Anole Annals started out in 2011, or so the founders’ imperfect memories recalled. Jonathan Losos and Rich Glor combined their talents to launch the site with the goal of being a repository for everything Anolis. With Jonathan’s vision and Rich’s tech savvy, the blog we all now know and love came into being in 2011. Or was it earlier? The earliest post I was able to track down was a charming poem by Yoel Stuart in 2009, at the time a graduate student at Harvard. A strange first post for the blog, and it was followed by a huge 6-month time gap. This led me to suspect that perhaps some early posts of Anole Annals were lost at some point. Yet it seems, however strange of a start, that this was in fact the first Anole Annals post published on November 21, 2009, as this blog post marking Anole Annals’ 2nd Birthday notes. And if you dig into the comments of that early post, you’ll also find the explanation for that odd early gap. From Rich: “Its worth pointing out that the first two posts to Anole Annals – one published in November 2009 and the second in May of 2010 – are outliers because the blog didn’t really get rolling with daily or near daily posts until late in October of 2010. All the more impressive that we’ve already racked up 369 posts!” Now, 9 years later, I asked Jonathan and Rich if they could shed some more light on these early days of Anole Annals.
Jonathan told me that his vision for the blog all those years ago was to be a “clearinghouse of information” for anoles — a place where researchers and the public alike could read about new papers, ideas, and observations of anoles. Initially, Jonathan started out with the lofty goal of publishing a post a day, which he carried on for quite awhile (writing many of the posts himself, a huge amount of work!). As the blog grew, Jonathan and Rich recruited graduate students and other anole researchers to write posts. At one point in these early days, the Losos Lab and the Glor lab agreed to have a friendly post-writing competition to see which lab could produce the most content for the blog over the course of a semester. The Glor Lab won, although rumors of “dubious ethical content” abound. In the years since, we’ve seen some amazing breakthroughs shared on the blog. Jonathan’s favorite? A Cuban tree frog that ate and then regurgitated a green anole that went on to live for several years (affectionately named “Gordon”).
Rich remembers things slightly differently. He noted that he handled the technical aspects of the blog and built the first site while Jonathan was the visionary behind it. The rest of his comments are a little more contentious, so I’ll let him speak for himself. He approved posting his comments verbatim, noting that “Fact-checking probably isn’t necessary.” Here’s Rich’s accounting of the early days of Anole Annals: “My lab and I were also responsible for most of the early posts, and all of the really good posts. Jonathan’s lab was busy trying to have some kind of competition, but we were just doing our thing and making tons of posts. This was also during the period when Jonathan’s Lab was exploring his longstanding belief that creatures like bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and unicorns were real, so they weren’t really doing any anole work at the time. They got so desperate that some of their posts were just sarcastic responses to our informative posts. Those were some dark days for the Losos Lab, but I’m glad they made it through the struggles.”
I suspect the truth may be some middle ground between these two stories. Perhaps the early contributors of the blog can fill in some of the details.
Since 2011, or 2009 (or whenever), the blog has grown to 2,605 published posts, 334 contributing authors, and 5,553 subscribers! Our all time view count is 1,840,029, which is probably underestimated because of several hosting switches over the years (some counters we have accessed on older versions of the site suggest the true number is closer to 2.5 million!). On our best day we reached 3,209 views, and the most popular post with 2,690 views on that day? None other than the viral-news anole from last year, Anolis aquaticus, the lizard that breathes underwater. Another top performer? Our series digging into the proposal to split Anolis into 8 genera, which inspired quite the debate here (check out: time to discuss, should it stay or should it go?, the case for splitting, the use of Anolis by the numbers, and a historical perspective). Of course, we’ve covered the new research presented at annual conferences like Evolution, SICB, and JMIH since the start. But we’ve also had some fun. In 2011 we had a poetry contest with some pretty amazing contributions. In 2011 we also launched our first photo contest, which turned into the annual calendar contest starting in 2012 (have you seen the amazing 2020 calendar?!). And then there was that time in 2016 when Martha Muñoz and Pavitra Muralidhar humored me by co-hosting the first (and only to date) Anole March Madness (I personally think we should bring this back). What’s your favorite memory from Anole Annals? Do you remember the early days? Tell us about it in the comments!
Seasonal changes in reproduction have been described for many taxa. As reproductive seasons progress, females often shift from greater energetic investment in many small offspring towards investing less total energy into fewer, better provisioned (i.e. larger) offspring. The underlying causes of this pattern have not been assessed in many systems.
Two primary hypotheses have been proposed to explain these patterns. The first is an adaptive hypothesis from life‐history theory: early offspring have a survival advantage over those produced later. Accordingly, selection favours females that invest in offspring quantity early in the season and offspring quality later. The second hypothesis suggests these patterns are not intrinsic but result from passive responses to seasonal changes in the environment experienced by reproducing females (i.e. maternal environment).
To disentangle the causes underlying this pattern, which has been reported in brown anole lizards (Anolis sagrei), we performed complementary field and laboratory studies. The laboratory study carefully controlled maternal environments and quantified reproductive patterns throughout the reproductive season for each female. The field study measured similar metrics from free ranging lizards across an entire reproductive season.
In the laboratory, females increased relative effort per offspring as the reproductive season progressed; smaller eggs were laid earlier, larger eggs were laid later. Moreover, we observed significant among‐individual variation in seasonal changes in reproduction, which is necessary for traits to evolve via natural selection. Because these patterns consistently emerge under controlled laboratory conditions, they likely represent an intrinsic and potentially adaptive adjustment of reproductive effort as predicted by life‐history theory.
The field study revealed similar trends, further suggesting that intrinsic patterns observed in the laboratory are strong enough to persist despite the environmental variability that characterizes natural habitats. The observed patterns are indicative of an adaptive seasonal shift in parental investment in response to a deteriorating offspring environment: allocating greater resources to late‐produced offspring likely enhances maternal fitness.
Since the invention of electric lighting, artificial light at night (ALAN) has become a defining, and evolutionary novel, feature of human-altered environments especially in cities. ALAN imposes negative impacts on many organisms, including disrupting endocrine function, metabolism, and reproduction. However, we do not know how generalized these impacts are across taxa that exploit urban environments. We exposed brown anole lizards, an abundant and invasive urban exploiter, to relevant levels of ALAN in the laboratory and assessed effects on growth and reproduction at the start of the breeding season. Male and female anoles exposed to ALAN increased growth and did not suffer increased levels of corticosterone. ALAN exposure induced earlier egg-laying, likely by mimicking a longer photoperiod, and increased reproductive output without reducing offspring quality. These increases in growth and reproduction should increase fitness. Anoles, and potentially other taxa, may be resistant to some negative effects of ALAN and able to take advantage of the novel niche space ALAN creates. ALAN and both its negative and positive impacts may play a crucial role in determining which species invade and exploit urban environments.
Extreme heat events are becoming more common as a result of anthropogenic global change. Developmental plasticity in physiological thermal limits could help mitigate the consequences of thermal extremes, but data on the effects of early temperature exposure on thermal limits later in life are rare, especially for vertebrate ectotherms. We conducted an experiment that to our knowledge is the first to isolate the effect of egg (i.e. embryonic) thermal conditions on adult heat tolerance in a reptile. Eggs of the lizard Anolis sagrei were incubated under one of three fluctuating thermal regimes that mimicked natural nest environments and differed in mean and maximum temperatures. After emergence, all hatchlings were raised under common garden conditions until reproductive maturity, at which point heat tolerance was measured. Egg mortality was highest in the warmest treatment, and hatchlings from the warmest treatment tended to have greater mortality than those from the cooler treatments. Despite evidence that incubation temperatures were stressful, we found no evidence that incubation treatment influenced adult heat tolerance. Our results are consistent with a low capacity for organisms to increase their physiological heat tolerance via plasticity, and emphasize the importance of behavioural and evolutionary processes as mechanisms of resilience to extreme heat.
Anolis chloris on the cover of Evolution, photo by J. Salazar
As 2019 wraps up, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on some of the major happenings of the year. It was an active year for Anole Annals and for the anole community. In 2019 we saw ~100 papers on anoles published (note: this is probably an underestimate, since this was based on my google scholar search for “Anolis” and “anole”; check out my list here). As you can see from the word cloud at top of the titles of these papers, anolologists are hard at work studying the ecology and evolution of our favorite lizards. Some major themes from the past year:
Anolis aquaticus has a bright orange dewlap (photo by Peter Mudde)
Other Significant Events of 2019
The past year has seen several other wonderful papers not highlighted here, if I missed one of your favorites, let me know in the comments. There were also many significant events in the Anole community in 2019 not captured by the publication record. Here’s a couple of my personal favorite stories from 2019. We’ve all wondered and hypothesized if the color shirt we wear while catching anoles influences our capture rate. Well Fondren, Swierk, and Putman finally answered the question for us. Turns out researchers were able to capture more A. aquaticus when they were wearing orange clothing, the same color as the dewlap! Another significant finding in A. aquaticus was the news that the lizard can breathe underwater, apparently using an air bubble on the snout. Although this news broke to the anole world in 2018 (check out the Anole Annals post to see some amazing video!), it was a major story in 2019 across regular news outlets and was published as a Natural History Note by Lindsey Swierk in the March publication of Herpetological Review.
Here on Anole Annals, we had some major happenings too! In January we published the 7th edition of the AnolisNewsletter, thanks to contributions from all of you and the hard work of the newsletter editors James Stroud, Anthony Geneva, and Jonathan Losos. We also unveiled the revamped Anole Annals website, which we are working hard on making a repository of information on anoles – from videos to species information and more. Stay tuned in the coming year as we unveil more updates and implement a new editorial board to bring Anole Annals into the new decade!
Thank you once again to everyone who participated in this year’s Anole Annals photo contest! As usual, we received tons of great photos, and we’re ready to announce the results. First up, the grand prize winner, is the above photo of Anolis sagrei from Port Saint Lucie, FL taken by Laurel Robertson. The second place winner is below, Anolis chloris from Parque Nacional Natural Tatamá, Colombia, by Jhan Salazar. Congratulations!
2nd place: Anolis chloris by Jhan Salazar
The rest of the winners are below, and their photos can be seen in the 2020 calendar here! Click the link to order your calendar. Do it now to take advantage of the Cyber Week sale – 50% off ending today!
Congrats again to all the winners, and happy holidays!
Thanks to all who submitted photos for the Anole Annals calendar contest–we received lots of great submissions! We’ve narrowed it down to the top 27, and now it’s time for you to vote! Here’s a slideshow of the finalists:
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Vote Now!
Choose your 6 favorites in the poll below. You can click on the thumbnail to view full-size images in the poll, check the box next to your picks. You have 10 days to vote – poll closes next Sunday at 11:59pm (12/1). Spread the word!
