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Outside pages of the program distributed at Hueyfest. Designed by Barry Sinervo.

A week ago Friday, 60 people gathered at the Burke Museum in Seattle to celebrate the career of Ray Huey. And what a career it’s been: thermal ecophysiology, comparative methods development, rapid evolution in Drosophila, effects of global warming on ectotherms, and much, much more.

And we heard all about it, and then some, in the eight talks that filled the day’s proceedings. The presentations were many and varied, but all had one theme: the important role Ray has played not only in the development of important ideas in science, but in the lives of the people with whom he has interacted. Here’s a few highlights:

Paul Hertz, who has worked with Ray since they were graduate students, reflected on Ray’s early days up to the present

Some of the photos of Ray in earlier days presented by Hertz

Next up was Joel Kingsolver, who provided an insightful analysis of Ray’s publishing approach.

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The Huffington Post featured an article yesterday on our old friend [1,2,3], Anolis proboscis. In these pages, this species has been called the horned anole of Ecuador, but Huffpo, following a post two days earlier on Livescience, calls it the Pinocchio anole. You make the call.

The article is about a group of our friends at Tropical Herping finding some specimens of this little seen species. Huffpo’s title, “Pinocchio lizard rediscovered in Ecuador after being thought extinct for 50 years,” takes a few licenses, primarily because, as the article notes, the species has been seen a number of times since 2005, which was only 40 years or so after the previous sighting. Still, it’s nice to see anoles getting the attention.

And, more importantly, the article plugs the wonderful new book on the reptiles and amphibians of Mindo, written and lavishly illustrated by the Tropical Herping team. The book is available now in online format and will be for sale in hardcopy before long. Definitely worth checking out.

And late-breaking news: there’s a video as well!

Who wouldn’t want to win one of these?

It’s that time again! 2014 is just around the corner, which means it’s time to start planning for another year. And what better way to mark the passage of time than with an anole calendar? As we did last year, we’re going to have a photo contest to get the best possible photographs for each month (check out the winning photos from last year). So, today Anole Annals is pleased to announce the 2013 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 Anole Annals wristwatch of the ecomorph of her/his choice. The second place winner will receive a copy of the calendar and have her/his photo featured on the backcover of the calendar.

The rules: please submit photos (as many as you’d like) 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 photo’s 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 November 1, 2013.

Anolis maynardi. Photo by J. Losos

AA commentator and Jamaican student Kuti Ra remarks (links to previous posts added by me:

“I notice a lot of fuss on Anole Annals about the skull morphology of carolinensis clade anoles, so I thought I’d weigh in with a theory of my own. All that you are about to read comes from pure indirect observation and speculation, so please keep that in mind.

First of all, I believe that the skull morphology of these anoles is directly related to their arboreal lifestyle and, more specifically, to the diet that such a lifestyle would facilitate. There have been several posts [1,2] about nectivory in anoles, but all these instances seem to involve carolinensis clade anoles (A. maynardi and A. carolinensis) and possessing a long tapered skull would undoubtedly make such feeding behaviour easier; this could come very useful as a trunk crown anole would encounter several blossoms and such high up in the trees in addition to various small fruits. In this respect, the forceps-like jaws could function something akin to a fruit-eating birds’ bill; considering all this, it would seem that the jaw morphology of carolinensis clade anoles is simply a useful adaptation for life in the canopy. This conclusion seems even more likely when you consider that sexual selection very likely wouldn’t play a role here as observations of Anolis maynardi suggests that longer-snouted males aren’t any more successful at securing mates; and why would they be, having such a long jaw narrow jaw would translate to a lower bite force and thus a less likely chance of emerging as the victor in a territorial battle?

No long schnoz here. Anolis grahami. Photo by J. Losos

Of course, this theory begs the question ‘‘Why didn’t the trunk-crown anoles on other Greater Antillean islands evolve to look like their carolinensis clade counterparts?” In my opinion, the answer is that they didn’t need to. You see, on Jamaica the trunk crown anole, Anolis grahami, has a skull that is overall very similar to the sympatric A. lineatopus, and though they are traditionally classified as belonging to different ecomorphs, I can testify from personal observation that they often share the same micro-habitat and thus compete for the same resources; however since there are only a few ecomorphs present  on Jamaica and wherever these two species occur they are of the only common species in that area, the resources available in a particular micro-habitat are often sufficient to support full populations of the two species; thus neither species has reached the point where it needs to adapt to consume different things than the other. Moving on to the neighbouring islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, one can recognize three things: first off, there are a greater number of trunk-ground anoles than on Jamaica, and more trunk-ground anoles than trunk-crown; second, all or almost all of the other ecomorphs are present  and third the jaws of the trunk-crown anoles are noticeably longer than that of sympatric trunk ground species (more so on Hispaniola than on Puerto Rico). On these islands, where there are often more species of anole competing for the resources of the trunk-ground niche, as well as additional ecomorphs to occupy other microhabitats, trunk crown anoles are becoming more and more specialized to take advantage of the resources available to them in the trees.

On Cuba, the largest island, there are often a great number of sympatric species of all ecomorphs and thus the habitat use of the anoles there is the most deeply segregated. I have read that in the Cuban rainforest, Anolis porcatus is almost never found out of the canopy; this seems to also be true of A.allisoni. This greater restriction to a particular microhabitat and need to capitalize on the resources found there  is what I believe  caused the Cuban trunk-crown to evolve such drastic adaptations to a trunk crown lifestyle. Well that’s my theory in a nutshell. I don’t know if all this has been said before but I haven’t been seen it mentioned. Like I said, most of it is based on indirect observation (looking at pictures on Google images) and speculation so I f you see any problems or holes in the theory, or if you’d like me to elaborate on or better explain a particular point, please let me know.

I think it is also important to note that the heads of trunk-crown anoles start out short on Jamaica and steadily get longer until you get to Cuba.

All the scenarios above would apply only to anoles in their natural habitats and not to populations inhabiting urban areas where more resources are available.

On a side note, have you ever noticed that trunk crown anoles have relatively tiny dewlaps? Perhaps one should look into how the ecomorph dewlaps are affected by those of neighboring ecomorphs. For example no matter what island you go to, the dewlap of any trunk-ground anole will always be comparatively larger than the dewlap of any trunk-crown anole on that island. I haven’t seen all species for Cuba, but I’m still pretty confident about it. I think these two ecomorphs in particular may have some very big effects on each other  that no one has noticed yet.

Ever wondered what the most viewed post on Anole Annals is? I bet it keeps many of you up late at night trying to guess. So, I’ll tell you. Over the last year, the single most viewed page is the one entitled “The Proper Pronunciation of ‘Anole’.” In that post, an AA reader asked how to pronounce our favorite noun, and many readers responded.

But that was more than two years ago, and languages evolve swiftly. Moreover, many have joined  AA’s readership since then. So, I’ll throw out the question again. For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts, as expressed Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree (p.10):

“…honorable, right-thinking people can disagree over whether the correct pronunciation is uh-nole or an-ole. I am less charitably inclined to my ninth grade biology teacher’s uh-no-lee, but, although I have never heard “anole” articulated in that way by anyone else, I am told that it is common in the South, from whence she came (I was surprised to find that this is the preferred pronunciation of the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, according to www.dictionary.com).

As for the origin of the name, Daudin [1802], who named the genus, said that “anolis” was the name the indigenous Caribs used for these lizards. However, there is some possibility that in fact “anolis” may have been their name for lizards in the genus Ameiva and that the correct Carib word was “oulléouma” (see discussion in Breuil, 2002). Right or wrong, Daudin clearly chose the more mellifluous name to bestow upon these lizards! A more interesting, though doubtless less accurate, explanation is the Saba Tourist Bureau’s statement (www.sabatourism.com) that “The scientific name of ‘Anolis’ comes from the popular name of “anole” for these lizards. Anole is an ancient African name, meaning “little devil”, that is given to small lizards in western Africa.”

Dear readers of Anole Annals,

Last year, I posted here requesting photos of extended dewlaps of adult male anoles of any species, for use in a study of the relationship between dewlap size and speciation rate. I thank all the readers who sent in one or a few photos, as well as the prolific photographers who have contributed many more. I even chipped in a few of my own photos last summer in Puerto Rico:

Thanks to everyone’s contributions, I’m up to around 185 species, even better than I’d hoped for. Before I start the analyses, I wanted to put out another call for photos, to see if anyone who missed the first post can help to fill in some of the species that are still missing from the collection.

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No, it’s not a hybrid, but why do some anoles do this? And how? Read all about it in a recent post on dust tracks on the web.

Photo by Luke Mahler.

I have noticed things like this myself. Some times when you noose a lizard, the scales underneath the noose turn dark. And so species show patterns when they are stressed that they don’t normally flaunt, like the A. garmani below. Anyone have thoughts or similar observations? Or a better photo of the phenomenon in garmani? Some images online suggest that males do this to a lesser extent when being aggressive to other males.

I was communicating recently with an eminent Gondwanan herpetologist, one who has published far and wide on many issues pertaining to many species. I remarked that it was time that he/she reached the pinnacle and worked on anoles. I received this response:

“To my mind, an anole is a little like a bicycle with training wheels – quite useful for youngsters to practice on and develop their skills. But just a pale shadow of the subtlety and sophistication of real lizards.  They just make it too easy to get lots of papers in good journals, and discover neat things.  Where’s the challenge?”

In contrast to their ubiquity at the evolution meetings [1,2], anoles are barely in attendance at the enormous Ecological Society of America meetings. Last year there were but three (including the famous “Kitty Cam” talk), and this year the dearth is worse, with but a single talk this week in Minneapolis. So, here it is, by Rich Glor and part of the symposium on “Coexistence of Closest Relatives: Synthesis of Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives”:

Patterns of Anolis lizard coexistence across a complex island landscape

Thursday, August 8, 2013: 3:40 PM

M100EF, Minneapolis Convention Center

Richard E. Glor , Biology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

Background/Question/Methods

In species rich adaptive radiations, complex patterns of species coexistence result from speciation and natural selection acting over evolutionary time. In Anolis lizards, similar communities of 4-6 arboreal microhabitat specialists that partition available perches by size and height have evolved independently on each of the four largest Caribbean islands. These well-studied communities of anole ‘ecomorphs,’ however, account for only a fraction of anole species diversity. Most anole diversification has occurred subsequent to microhabitat specialization, resulting in complexes of closely-related species that belong to the same ecomorph but appear to be allopatrically or parapatrically distributed in different macrohabitats. We use integrative analyses that combine thousands of anole species occurrence records from public biodiversity databases, GIS environmental data, molecular phylogenetic and population genetic data, and data on phenotypic variation to test three predictions about anole species co-occurrence across the island of Hispaniola: (1) local communities tend to be comprised of microhabitat specialists that evolve relatively early in anole radiations, (2) closely-related or incipient species tend to be allopatrically or parapatrically distributed in distinct macrohabitats, and (3) habitat filtering in extreme habitats leads to communities in which species that are more closely related to one another than expected by chance.

Results/Conclusions

Our analyses support the prediction that local communities tend to be comprised of phenotypically distinct microhabitat specialists that evolved early in anole radiations and are relatively distantly related. Our analyses also support the prediction that closely-related species tend to be allopatrically or parapatrically distributed in distinct macrohabitats. This result, together with a growing body of molecular population genetic data, suggests that both geographic and ecological processes play an important role in recent anole speciation events, and dictate patterns of co-occurrence in closely related anole species. Finally, we find preliminary support for the importance of habitat filtering by recovering evidence for a latitudinal gradient in the phylogenetic composition of local communities whereby communities at the highest altitudes tend to include more closely-related species than communities at lower altitudes. This pattern is particularly evident in the Cordillera Central, where communities of closely related and ecologically unusual species tend to occur at the highest altitudes.