I am interested in whether, how, and why ecology shapes evolution (and evolution shapes ecology) through time, with an emphasis on microevolutionary pattern and process, adaptation, and field experiments. I completed my Ph.D. on Anolis lizards in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Austin studying threespine stickleback. They're not anoles, but they're cool too.
Screen shot of Anolis sagrei male and female from The Runner
Anole Annals regulars Nathan Dappen and Neil Losin, of Day’s Edge Productions, have won another prize for their filmmaking. This time, it’s for their entry, The Runner, in the World Wildlife Fund video competition themed “Life. Nature. You. Make the Connection.”
Screen shot of Anolis carolinensis male from The Runner
Footage of Anolis sagrei and A. carolinensis in Miami plays during seconds 40-45.
Anolis carolinensis hatchling in our animal facility.
I’ve noticed that many of the anoles in my breeding colony occasionally have white protuberances emerging from their nostrils, like the two-month old hatchling to the left. I haven’t been able to determine whether these protuberances are the remnants of an old shed or whether the lizards have a fungus growing in their nostrils. By the time I catch an afflicted individual in its cage the protuberances are gone, seemingly because the lizard blew them out while moving to evade my hand. Has anyone experienced this phenomenon?
We’ve decided to extend the deadline for the poetry competition one more week. We’ve had a number of good entries but would love some more!
Clockwise from top left: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, John Keats, and You
What do all these people have in common? Well, they’re all poets in case you didn’t know it. On Nov. 21 2009, two years ago to the day, Jonathan Losos contributed the first Anole Annals blog post. The post contained a few of my Anolis themed haikus including:
Poe named an anole
williamsmittermeieror’m:
Ponder, weak, weary.
AND
Perched on a warm day,
Dewlap dewlap dewlap dew –
Blackbird predation.
In celebration of two years and 369 anole-related posts that followed, Anole Annals is hosting a poetry slam for all you anole wordsmiths out there.
Over the next two weeks, we challenge you to create a poem or poems in any form (e.g. haiku, limerick, sonnet, lyric, quatrain etc.). The only requirement is that they relate to anoles in some way.
A grass bush anole, Anolis olssoni, from the Dominican Republic. Note the three colored beads sewed into the tail musculature for easy identification in the field. Photo by Michele Johnson.
Many studies of natural selection, behavioral ecology, and population biology in anoles focus on one to several populations over the course of days, weeks, or months. These studies require reliable identification of individual lizards over time. I describe several ID’ing methods in this post. Read on!
Anolis porcatus juvenile stalks a skipper butterfly (Hesperidae) in Bani, Dominican Republic. Photograph by Miguel Landestoy.
Over the past 6 weeks or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time caring for Anolis carolinensis hatchlings as part of my common garden experiment. One of the most striking things that I’ve noticed about these growing lizards is how a hatchling’s hunting behavior changes over time. Description of juvenile hunting behavior and a cool hunting video from a different species after the jump…
This female Anolis carolinensis has a tail that is kinked in a zig-zag fashion, starting from what seems to be the proximal autotomization point and continuing distally along the tail. The kinks are permanent. Running the tail between one’s fingers fails to smooth out the zig-zags. Have any anoleologists out there seen this growth pattern before? Any idea what might cause it? Additional photos and an x-ray are after the jump.
The cages in which females are individually housed during the common garden experiment. Each cage has a bamboo perch and a plant in potting soil where the lizard can lay her eggs.
We are in the midst of a common garden experiment in which we’ve taken gravid Anolis carolinensis females from morphologically differentiated populations in the wild and returned with them to the lab where we are collecting eggs to incubate and hatch. Obviously I needed some gardening tools to pull this off, so I headed to bestofmachinery.com to get some since our local hardware burned down and still under construction. We’d eventually like to know whether the offspring of these females maintain the differentiation observed in the wild under common growth conditions. If yes, this is good evidence that the differences we’ve observed are a result of genetic changes among populations, rather than phenotypic plasticity during development and growth. A few notes from this ongoing experiment follow.
headed
bestofmachinery.com
bestofmachinery.com
bestofmachinery.com
bestofmachinery.com
bestofmachinery.com
The Space Shuttle Atlantis lifting off from the horizon. Fellow lizarders Todd Campbell (L) and Casey Gilman (R) look on.
On July 8, we took a break from field work here in Florida to watch the launch of NASA’s last Space Shuttle mission. During the build up to the launch, I thought a lot about the end of the Shuttle program and of the scientific frontier that we are, at least temporarily, leaving. Naturally, my thoughts eventually turned to whether anoles have ever been to space.
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