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Missing anoles? Or missing anole biogeographers?

As you may (or may not) know, the 6th meeting of the International Biogeography Society (IBS) is underway in Miami, FL.

So here I am, in the anole invasion capital of the world, with the Caribbean on the doorstep, and a look through the conference program reveals a paltry TWO talks on our favourite lizards. Contrast this with Martha Munoz’s reports from SICB, with 18 (or so) anole talks. Of course, there’s something to be said for quality over quantity and the two anole presentations here do a good job of flying the flag. Yesterday Jonathan Losos kicked off one of the symposia with a talk on anole traits, function and biogeography (with a smashing blue / yellow colour scheme), and later today I’ll be searching out a poster on anole fossil assemblages (post forthcoming)

Nonetheless, I still can’t help wonder, where are the anole biogeographers? You can’t look through a text on island biogeography, species area curves or adaptive radiation without finding a dewlap. So the question is, are people not doing anole biogeography anymore? This isn’t the case, so it can only be that either the IBS isn’t on the radar, or people choose not to go. Either way, you’re missing out on a great meeting – it’s an excellent opportunity for the anole research community to radiate and reach a slightly different audience.

Regular readers of Anole Annals will know that, like humans, anoles are parasitized by malaria. It’s a different lineage of malaria specialized for lizards but it is malaria none-the-less.

What readers of Anole Annals might not know, however, is that anoles don’t seem to suffer from the cold, the flu, or whooping cough (not according to a quick literature search, anyways).

These illnesses do afflict humans, however, and this winter season is shaping up to be a serious one. Perhaps you have already experienced this.

Top things to do to avoid getting and/or passing on the flu this season:
1) Wash your hands frequently.
2) Avoid touching your mouth, nose, and eyes.
3) Stay home if you’re sick. Keep your kids home if they’re sick. And encourage your colleagues to stay home if they’re sick.
4) Get your flu shot and your pertussis booster.
5) Encourage your friends to get their shots too. Herd immunity!
6) Develop lizardy super powers that render you invincible.

PS: The flu-shot cannot give you the flu by accident. This is a pernicious myth. The virus particles injected in the flu shot are dead, zapped, kaput. You may feel a little under the weather as your body works to develop antibodies but that’s a whole lot better than getting the actual flu. I felt fine after my flu shot.

Sometimes anoles are lovers, too. But even when they love, they seem to fight. Photo of Anolis carolinensis taken from Wikipedia.

Greetings again from San Francisco! The anticipation for  yesterday’s Animal Communication session was palpable. Usually a big Anolis hit at SICB, the Communication session did not fail to impress. The session was divided into two sections – Lovers and Fighters. Can you guess which one had all the anole talks? Three out of the five talks in the Fighters session were about anoles. Incidentally, most of the talks in the Lovers session were about tree frogs. This was perfectly to my liking – I’ll take the blood, guts, and gore any day. The three Anolis talks presented fascinating new work.

The first was by Jessica Edwards, a graduate student working with Simon Lailvaux at the University of New Orleans on aggressive encounters between Anolis carolinensis and A. sagrei, which has successfully invaded much of A. carolinensis‘ range. In a previous study, Jessica and Simon found that A. carolinensis tends to perch higher in the presence of A. sagrei than when found alone.  For her experiment, Jessica placed one male of each species into a large cage with a single perch. At the top of this perch she placed a heat lamp, so that there was one optimal site (warm top) and one sub-optimal site (cool bottom) on the perch. She then scored behaviors and recorded the victor in each trial.  She found that relative dewlap size was a good predictor of trial outcome, and that the each species was about equally successful at obtaining the optimal perch, although A. sagrei did have a slight advantage. She repeated this experiment using females of each species, and found something exciting and perhaps unexpected – Anolis sagrei was the clear victor in all but one of several dozen trials! Jessica posits that, in the wild, female A. sagrei push female A. carolinensis higher up in the trees. In polygynous systems such as anoles, where one male defends a group of two or more females, then we would expect the males to go where the females do, and so would expect males to increase their perch heights, as well.

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Greetings again from San Francisco! Day One of SICB has been full of amazing talks and posters. The poster session yielded interesting new research by Diego Castro and Michele Johnson, of Trinity University, on the relationship between testosterone and dewlapping behavior. Diego, an undergraduate studying neurobiology, asked whether muscles involved in sexual or aggressive behavior would have increased testosterone. To answer this question, Diego focused on five species of Dominican anoles, including Anolis brevirostris,  A. coelestinus, A. cybotes, and A. olssoni. Diego observed the natural behavior of these species, and quantified the average number of pushups and dewlaps they performed. They found that A. coelestinus and A. cybotes have fewer dewlap extensions and several pushups in their displays, while A. brevirostris dewlaps as often as it performs pushups. They then quantified the concentration of androgen receptors in the ceratohyoid, which controls dewlap extension to determine whether levels of androgen receptor protein correlate with sexual display behavior. They found that species with greater display rates also had a higher number of cells expressing androgen receptor protein. Their next goal is to measure androgen receptor protein in the bicep and tricep. Great job, Diego!

Some time in the wee hours tonight or early tomorrow, the 300,000th visitor will traipse through Anole Annals. Not bad since we only reached 100,000 barely more than a year ago, on December 16, 2011, when some lunkhead from Valdosta, GA logged in. Who will claim this great honor? And when will it occur? You can keep track yourself by checking the stats counter at the bottom of the sidebar on the right side of the screen. And if you haven’t done so before, click on the world map just above it, to see in rotating 3-D where people are visiting AA right now.

Next AA milestone: our 1000th post, slated for later this winter. So far, in our two year and change history, we’ve had 919 posts by 87 contributors from 11 countries and five continents. Not to mention 3,356 comments.

As Martha Muñoz reported two months ago, the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meetings, beginning Thursday in San Francisco, will be awash with anole research. Check out the list of talks here, the full story in Martha’s post, and stay tuned for updates from ‘frisco.

Recently we posted the Poe lab’s guide to the hyperdiverse anole community of El Cope, Panama, which harbors 12 anole species. Only slightly less diverse is the community of anoles at Rio Palenque, Ecuador, which has 11 species, and the Poe team has put together a guide for this locality as well. A small version appears below, and the full size pdf can be accessed here.

Just found this on Twitter. http://t.co/tHk3ZQBN

People often stop me on the street to ask “how do you come up with so many great topics to post on?” The answer I give is one simple word: “Twitter.” If you want to stay on top of the anole world, there’s no better way than to see what Anole Nation is tweeting. Try it yourself and you’ll see that most new anole papers get mentioned, as well as news of all sorts, and all kinds of great photos and other anolillenea.

And other great stuff, too, like this great curse: “I hope you accidentally swallow an anole and choke on it.” As well as many touching human interest stories, such as this one: “Good Christ! I just went to get the mail from the box and a stupid Knight Anole lizard over a foot long jumped on my arm before bolting.”

How do I do it? I simply search on “anole” and “anolis”. There are some drawbacks, though. For example, it seems a lot of people don’t know how to spell “alone” or–I’m guessing here–“ahole”. So a bunch of the tweets don’t make a lot of sense. And how could I forget? All the tweets about the comic book character Anole, who’s exploits seem to be drawing an ever greater audience (as befits the world’s first gay superhero).

Detour on the information superhighway

And then there’s the bane of my twitter-life: some Japanese tweeters have incorporated “anole” or “anolis” into their twitternames, so periodically there’s a flood of banal tweets in Japanese to scroll through (ok, you got me, I don’t really know that they’re banal because, after all, they’re in Japanese–who knows, maybe they are important insights on anole taxonomy and biogeography). Plus, recently a dude named Ben with his address at “@anole” has started tweeting a ton of irrelevancies.

And, of course, there is some information that you’d rather not know about, like the oft-retweeted link to a disgusting video of a teenager biting a live anole in half and eating it.

It’s a brave new cyberworld out there, but if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of the ever changing anolosphere, Twitter’s the way to go. Unless there’s some new thing that’s better.

The 2013 Anole Annals Anole Calendar has been flying off the shelves, but a few remain, and for those of you savvy shoppers who’ve waited until after Christmas, now’s the time: Zazzle is offering 65% off through Friday. Never too late for a late holiday present! The order page is here; use the Discount code: GIFTSYOUWANT. Get yours before they’re all gone!