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Anole in the house. Photo from Daffodil’s Photo Blog

AA reader Katharine from southern Florida writes:

Residing on the 4th floor of a concrete condominium in S.E. Florida offers a unique living experience, reminiscent of the Alpharetta GA property trends that prioritize both architectural style and natural ambiance. Our building is part of a community that boasts six units per floor, all accessible via outdoor catwalks. The ground level of our building is adorned with lush landscaping and ligustrum trees that stretch up to the second floor, enhancing the beauty and privacy of the outdoor walkways. At night, the catwalks are gently illuminated by overhead lights at each doorway, creating a serene and safe environment reminiscent of the thoughtful community planning found in Alpharetta’s residential designs.

For some reason anole lizards seem to find their way more to my unit (when I open my entrance door they come in) than the others on the same floor all with the same ground floor foliage, trees & overhead lights. One also sees the feces they’ve left overnight in front of my unit and not the others.

It makes me wonder if these lizards travel as ants do, following a leader either by a scent or fluid left by the leader or previous lizard?  I’ve learned that these lizards are attracted both to light (obviously, the catwalk lights) & the greenery.  However,  the other units on the same floor under the same conditions don’t seem to have the same invasion.

I’ve done as much Google researching as I can but can’t seem to find an answer.  Do you have an answer or can you direct me where I can look.?  Obviously, I’m trying to find some way to deter or reroute their path.”

I’m a big believer in the utility of watching animals in their natural environment, and it’s therefore no surprise that one of my favourite talks at the Animal Behaviour Society 2014 meeting was based on many, many hours of painstaking observation of Uromastyx ornata lizards in the rocky, arid cliffs of the Eilat Mountains in Israel. Amos Bouskila of Ben Gurion University presented an exciting outcome of this tremendous observation effort—a novel social behaviour in the Ornate Spiny Tailed Lizard, a large agamid that ranges from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. Here’s a video  of this behaviour (starts at roughly 0:55) for National Geographic, filmed by Eyal Bartov.

This novel behaviour comprises an interaction between a male and a female, and includes the following steps:

1. The female flips over onto her back (or is pushed onto her back by the male, as in the video above).

2. The male walks over the female’s body a few times

3. The female rights herself and moves away.

The sequence of events can be initiated by either the male or the female (though it’s predominantly female initiated), occurs both before and after copulation, and continues to occur well into the nesting season. Bouskila therefore rejects the notion that the behaviour is related to copulation, and speculates that it instead relates to chemical signalling (males have enlarged femoral pores in this species) and that it functions to maintain pair bonds between these long-lived lizards. Further observation will tell if this exciting hypothesis holds true!

We’ve seen photos of spiders eating anoles before, but this takes it to another level, a nasty golden orb weaver spider taking down the King himself. Admittedly, King, Jr., but still. Whoa. The photo is online with no information.

As lizards go, it’s hard to beat an anole. But geckos come pretty close. Anole Annals, of course, is dedicated to reporting all things anole, but until Gecko Gossip debuts, we feel it’s only polite to occasionally comment on geckonid happenings.

In that light, we were impressed to see the culinary prowess of the Tokay gecko, which apparently quite regularly preys on small rats in the Philippines. Read all about it in Herpetology Notes.

This was tweeted by Gretchen. What’s the story?

An actively foraging anole on the prowl (A. tigrinus; photo by J. Losos)

Nearly 50 years ago, Eric Pianka proposed the idea that hunting animals forage in one of two ways, either actively foraging for prey or sitting-and-waiting for food to wander by. These ideas were initially promulgated with lizards in mind, and much of the research in the last half century has involved lizards. Anoles haven’t been a major player in the work, but their certainly have been some studies conducted on anoles.

This post is motivated by a paper published by Cooper et al. in Herpetology Notes last year in which new data are presented on six anole species, as well as for a variety of other species. The anole data conform both to previous data on the same species and studies on anoles in general: as lizards go, anoles are on the sit-and-wait end of the spectrum, moving relatively little (think about the other end of the spectrum, species like whiptail lizards which seem to move almost non-stop).

I was surprised in looking through the archives to see that we haven’t previously had a post on AA about foraging mode. Now we do! And for some background: I reviewed what we know about anole foraging in a five-page section of Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree. The take-home messages:

1. By comparison to other lizards, anoles don’t move much and would be considered sit-and-wait foragers;

2. Nonetheless, among anoles, some are much more active foragers than others;

3. Caribbean anoles are much more active than mainland species;

4. Much remains to be learned about the specifics of anole foraging and how it differs among species

And here are some highlights, from the footnotes:

“Some of the danger inherent in an active foraging mode was apparent in another observation of a female [A. valencienni] moving upside down on a bromeliad, searching for prey (quoting from Trivers’ field notes, p. 575): “. . . it seems to spot something on a neighboring bromeliad, also upside down. I too spot something on the second bromeliad. Starts to dart the 5 cm to the neighboring bromeliad but—as if forgetting it is upside down—it steps into thin air and falls 6 m to the ground. It appears to be uninjured.”

“Examples of this prey-catching behavior were provided for the relatively short-limbed A. carolinensis (under the name A. principalis) by Lockwood (1876, p. 7): “I have just been watching Nolie eying a fly which was walking on one of the glass panes of his house. He made a noiseless advance of about three or four inches; then followed a spring, when he was seen cleaving to the glass by his feet, and champing the captured fly. I saw him once intently watching the movements of a fly which was walking on the glass. As seemed evident to me by an ominous twitch of that little head, his mind was made up for a spring; but lo, there was a simultaneous makeup of mind on the part of the fly, which at this juncture flew towards the other side of the case. Then came—and how promptly—mental act number two of Anolis, for he sprang as the after-thought directed, and caught the insect on the fly.” Dial and Roughgarden (1995) report an anole jumping from a branch one meter above a spider web, catching the spider as it passed by, before landing in the vegetation below.”

We’ve noted before that little is known about dewlap use by females. Here’s a video of green anoles mating in which the female periodically bobs her head and occasionally sticks out her dewlap.

Arthur Loveridge was one of the great scholars of African herpetology, and a fascinating individual, curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology for 33 years. AA has recently come across a pdf of his obituary written by Ernest Williams, who succeeded him at the MCZ.

The obituary is fascinating not only because it details the career of an important, yet quirky, individual in our field, but also marks how the profession of museum curator has changed markedly from the days in which curators were wealthy amateurs, popping around to satisfy their curiosity. Of course, I’m sure Loveridge’s sentiments would find happy agreement today: “Probably only a zoologist can look at an uncaught cobra and feel the joy a child feels on Christmas morning.”

The paper’s worth reading for the various stories about the “Demon Curator,” including the drawer labelled “string too short to use” and the famous footnote in the 1957 Loveridge and Williams turtle monograph.

Anolis transversalis, female on the left

We’ve talked previously about anole species that differ in the color of their dewlaps, but I don’t recall any discussion of species in which the males differ markedly in body patterning. Certainly, that happens a lot. For example, we’ve talked a lot about polymorphisms in female back patterns, but in most of these species, the males don’t have any of the patterns shown by the females. And in this case, and many others, one sex is patterned and the other one pretty much isn’t.

In any case, Anolis transversalis is a great example of a species in which both sexes are patterned, but differently. And to boot, their dewlaps are differently colored as well. What a species!

Does anyone want to suggest–or better yet, supply photos–of other species in which both sexes are patterned, but differently?