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According to Ze Frank, this screen capture shows the cover of the children’s book “Lizard Has A ****** Day.”

If you’re not already familiar with Comedian Ze Frank’s True Facts Series, you need to check them out. Frank interweaves interesting facts about wildlife with hilariously (off)color commentary. He’s done videos on everything from star-nosed moles to dung beetles (I was first alerted of the series by a comment made by Tracy Heath over at the new Treethinkers blog). I was recently viewing True Facts About The Tarsier, and was shocked to see this puny little Southeast Asian quasi-monkey feeding on one of my favorite lizards. At around 1:26 into this video, Frank notes that the Tarsier is “the only entirely carnivorous primate, eating insects, rodents, reptiles and small birds. This incidentally is the cover of the children’s book “Lizard Has A ****** DAY.” Very funny. Of course, its practically impossible that a tarsier in nature would be feeding on what appears to be a  green anole (Anolis carolinensis). As far as I’m aware A. carolinensis is not been reported from any of the Southeast Asian islands occupied by the tarsier. Thus, if there’s we’ve learned from this video, it is that this lizard is having a ****** day because somebody just thrust it into the waiting arms of a captive tarsier.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jz0JcQYtqo

The saga continues. Last December, the Reptile Database, the online listing of all recognized reptile species, issued an update in which anoles were split into the eight genera proposed by Nicholson et al. Now, in the subsequent update released yesterday, they’ve done an about-face and changed all anoles back to Anolis. Here’s what they have to say:

“Anolis. After serious contemplation (and consultation with several experts) we changed the names of anoles back to Anolis. For some reasons see Poe et al. (2013) Zootaxa 3626 (2): 295–299.”

Interestingly, the very next item was this:

“Teiidae. The names of many teiids have changed following the suggestions of  Harvey et al. (2012) Zootaxa 3459: 1–156. However, we are already getting complaints that this may not be tenable…”

So, seems like these issues may not necessarily be unique to anoles. The Reptile Database is a great resource for the herpetological community, but I don’t envy it the task of trying to decide when to change names and when not to. Moreover, since it has become so widely used, its decisions probably have an outsized impact on whether people adopt proposed changes or not.

In any case, for any readers who need to get up to speed, the Poe et al. paper referred to above was discussed several weeks ago, and the entire discussion thread on the proposed taxonomy of Nicholson et al. is probably best found by searching with the term “Nicholson” in the search bar to the right.

AA reader Ava writes: “Ironic that on Easter, I found myself on an egg hunt and found a green anole egg that I suspected had just been laid.  She would have laid it last night.  I put it in a cricket keeper (covered big holes), included the very soil the egg had been laid in and placed the keeper back in the main terrarium in the area where I had found it.

I read, afterward, that the position of the egg should not be disturbed. I fear I may have shifted it around in transfer. Have I blown it? Can one tell which end is up?

I live in Florida where the ‘takeover’ of the brown Bahamian anoles has been increasingly apparent.  The ‘greenies’ as we call them have taken to the trees, but seem fewer every year.  The browns are so aggressive. My hope is to ‘repopulate’ a certain mango tree where we used to see them. Pointless?  Anyone?

Haiti has some spectacular anoles found nowhere else. For example, if you go to CaribHerp and click on “Haiti” in left toolbar, you see the 176 species of herps in the country. Then click filter by “Dactyloidae” and you see the 32 recognized anole species.

13 of those are endemic to the country, but there are quite a few in the works (not yet described). One beautiful endemic Haitian species, Anolis monticola, is on the cover of Jonathan’s book “Lizards in an evolutionary tree.” Deforestation continues, with only 1% forest cover remaining, so almost everything will be disappearing soon.

For several years I’ve been doing some intense field work in Haiti, and professional photographers have joined on the trips. In collaboration with the Audubon Society of Haiti (Philippe Bayard, president), we put together a large biodiversity calendar for this year, with text translated in 3 languages. It opens into a 24″ x 12″ poster. Anoles are on the cover and a month is mostly devoted to anoles. After some unexpected delay they have arrived and we’re happy to give them away, for cost of shipping/packing. If interested, see Caribnature for images of the calendar, and instructions to order:

Tess Driessens, but that’s no lizard

Channel 27 in Grand Cayman has just aired a report on the doctoral work of Tess Driessens (co-winner of the 2012 Anole Photo contest!) and Simon Baeckens (actually, from their webpages, this seems like Tess’s project). They’re studying the diversity of dewlap color in Anolis sagrei by looking at brown anoles throughout their range.

Anthony Herrel, Rosario Castañeda and I are just back from a three-week trip to Colombia and Venezuela to collect data on the natural history of several little-known anole species. Unbeknownst to us, we were retracing the work of Harvard graduate student and naturalist extraordinaire Ken Miyata, who conducted similar—though more extensive, fieldwork on two of our focal species—A. (Phenacosaurus) heterodermus and A. onca in the 1970’s.

Fortunately, our South American colleagues were more knowledgeable than we are and pointed us to contributions in Anolis Newsletter II and III in which Miyata and Ross Kiester detailed their work and findings, which, alas, were never formally published. I’ll be reporting on what we saw, both here and in the Scientist at Work blog of the New York Times (first post this morning), but if you want to get up to speed, check out these reports. And, more generally, this indicates the wealth of important information available in the Anolis Newsletters, all six of which are available.

Lastly, a teaser: we’ll be hearing more about Ken Miyata in the next few months.

Today’s Island of the Day is actually a set of three islands that make up The Cayman Islands: Little Cayman, Grand Cayman, and Cayman Brac.

Little Cayman is a quiet little diving community with less than 100 residents, made up mostly of expats and people who run the hotels that host the tourists attracted by some of the best diving and snorkeling in the Caribbean. When I was there, we met some locals who gave us a tour of the island and we circumnavigated Little Cayman in about 20 minutes by car. We saw the endangered Cyclura caymanensis on the northern side of the island, in a spot where they congregate for tourists to feed them. As far as Anolis go, Little Cayman has Anolis maynardi, a very long-snouted green anole. They also have a red-dewlapped population of Anolis sagrei that Jason Kolbe showed is more closely related to populations of A. sagrei on Cuba than they are to populations of red-dewlapped A. sagrei on Grand Cayman.

The Western arm of Grand Cayman, the biggest island, feels a little bit like South Beach in Miami, with expensive resort hotels, boutique shopping, and a rocking beach and nightlife scene. As you go farther east, you find the the classic Caribbean dry forests growing among the karst outcroppings. The endangered Grand Cayman Blue Iguana, Cyclura lewisi, has a remnant population in and around the botanical gardens on the east end of the island. This species is not blue like Anolis gorgonae but it does have a bluish-green sheen depending on how the light hits it.

The Grand Cayman Blue Iguana
(photo from the Wikipedia page)

Anolis conspersus is notable on Grand Cayman – it is related to A. grahami from Jamaica but has evolved a beautiful purplish-blue dewlap, very different from A. grahami’s yellow dewlap.

Cayman Brac feels like Little Cayman, except that it is bigger, has a few population centers, and is dominated by a bluff that grows from nothing in the west to a towering 150 feet in the east. During hurricanes, people living on Cayman Brac used to climb up to and take refuge in caves that weave back into the bluff. We spent some time on Brac looking for a cryptic invasion of Anolis sagrei sagrei into the endemic Anolis sagrei luteosignifer population. That project is ongoing in the lab. It was fun to work there and we met many friendly people.

For more on Cayman herps, check out: CaribHerp.org.

Time for some geographical Jeopardy.

The answer is: The highest point in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The question is: What is Mount Scenery?

At a towering 870m, the active volcano Mt. Scenery on the island of Saba (pronounced say-buh), is the correct response. Saba is an island near St. Kitts and St. Barts in the Lesser Antilles and is the smallest special municipality of the Netherlands. At only 5 sq. miles (13 sq. km), it doesn’t have too many people (1,824 in 2001) or terrestrial herps (7). Of those herps, only one is endemic to Saba, and that is, of course, an anole – Anolis sabanus! You can find more information on the rest of the Saban herps at Caribherp.org.

It’s that time again, time to invite/implore AA readers to contribute posts. All are welcome. Have any interesting questions about anole biology, cool photos? Want to comment on a recent (or not-so-recent) paper of interest? Or tell us about your research plans or results? Anole Annals is a forum for all of these, and anything else anole-related. And now’s a particularly good time, as your trusted correspondent is leaving the country for several weeks. Fear not, there will be reports from the field, but it’s a good time for contributions from any and all! If you’ve never posted before, it’s easy, and instructions can be found here or contact the AA Editorial Offices at anoleannals@gmail.com.