Over at “Catalogue of Organisms: inordinate fondness for systematics,” an Australian site dedicated to biodiversity, anoles are the clade du jour. Maitre d’ Christopher Taylor overcomes his entomological proclivities to write an extensive and insightful overview of anole diversity. Fair dinkum!
Several community challenges have emerged on Anole Annals in recent years such as the popular “Spot the anole” series (here, here, and here for example). Today I raise a new challenge to anole enthusiasts worldwide. I challenge you to post a single photo of anoles in the wild with the greatest species diversity. Integrity counts: photos and lizards should not be manipulated. The lizards should have naturally come into close proximity on their own volition.
To start this out I will set the bar to beat at three species. I took this photo last weekend at the University of Miami arboretum. The three species, from left to right, are A. distichus, A. carolinensis, and A. sagrei. I expect that three should be relatively easy to beat so lets see what you’ve got!
asks reader Esteban Dominguez Vargas, who posted the photo on his Flickr page. For more on A. anoriensis, read here.
Anole biologist and phylogenetic comparative methods wizard Liam Revell has shamelessly used a photo of Anolis evermanni just so we would advertise his three-week field biology course in Puerto Rico to be held next January. And you know what? It worked: the field-based course in tropical biology – focusing on ecology, evolution, and conservation biology – will be offered for the first time in January 2013 during the UMass Boston winter session (and hopefully annually thereafter). More info here.
Most invasive vertebrates have a high reproductive rate, and are able to build up a large population under ideal conditions. A recently published report on the reproductive cycle of the brown anole (Anolis sagrei) in Taiwan highlights this again.
This study demonstrated that the reproductive cycle of the Anolis sagrei population in Taiwan is long and cyclic, and that it is very similar to that of conspecific populations in Belize, Cuba, Florida, and Hawaii.
We found that as in Florida, the females become sexually mature at about 34 mm SVL. As in other studies, we found that Anolis sagrei females produces multiple clutches, consisting of a single egg, throughout most of the year, and that due to sperm storage, are able to produce viable eggs for a few weeks, even in the absence of males.
Unlike in other studies, we found that the males could be sexually mature at a much smaller SVL (ca. 30 mm), and that at least some males with spermatozoa, which could mate, are present throughout the year. The smaller SVL of the males mean a shorter time from hatching to the age at which mating can commence. And even though it is uncertain that such males would be able to compete with larger territorial males, these smaller males would certainly have mating opportunities in the absence of larger males in founder populations.
We found that the hatchlings have a SVL of about 18 mm, and as in other studies, they hatch after a period of about 30 days.
In view of the potential for A. sagrei taking over new territories, to prevent future introductions of this species, we strongly feel that drastic steps are merited.
The Centenary celebration at the Academy of Natural Sciences... The bicentenary will be a far less formal affair.
Two hundred years ago today a group of seven prominent Philadelphians: two physicians, a dentist, an apothecary, a manufacturing chemist, a distiller and naturalist Thomas Say formally founded the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the first natural history museum in North American. Today and for the next year the Academy will hold events celebrating its long history of contribution to natural history research.
Over the past 200 years the Academy has played a continuing role in advancing natural history research from the myriad contributions of entomologist/malacologist/ herpetologist Thomas Say, to Ruth Patrick‘s work testing the predictions MacArthur and Wilson‘s theory of island biogeography, and Ted Daeschler’s co-discovery and analysis of transitional fish-tetrapod fossils. This being Anole Annals, read on for a summary of the Academy’s contributions to the anole world…
Can someone please identify this lizard to species? Is it an anole?
The preserved lizard, and the bat next to it, are sitting on a shelf in Ernest Hemingway’s bathroom, which I visited this past January. (Okay, I visited his estate and former home near Havana, Cuba, but you can’t actually step inside the house so I had to take the photograph–with my iPhone–through the open bathroom window.)
As everyone knows, Hemingway was a consummate sportsman, fisherman and hunter. He especially was a fan of big game; many trophy heads of large African mammals decorate the walls of his living room. Surely, however, there is no bigger game than the giant lizard shown here. I presume that it was taken on his estate, but as far as I can tell there is no collecting tag or other kind of identifying label and nobody whom I asked could shed any additional light. Indeed, no one else whom I was with had even noticed the two prize specimens sitting in adjacent jars.
For more information about the estate, look here: <http://www.hemingwaycuba.com/finca-la-vigia.html>.
Thanks very much.
I come to you, anologists of the world, with a request for your photos of anole dewlaps. I’m planning a study of dewlap size evolution across the Anolis phylogeny, but there’s not much data available for many of the less common species. I know many anole-hunters take pictures of their quarry with dewlaps extended after catching them, so I thought I’d try to extract data (e.g. dewlap length and area) from a collection of photos. If you have photos you might be able to share, please read on, and feel free to contact me if you have questions.
Requirements:
-The photo should show a live, adult male caught in the wild. Its dewlap should be fully extended – ideally either of its own volition or with tweezers, but fingers are ok as long as at least 90% of the dewlap area is visible.
-The anole’s entire head should be in the photo (so I can scale dewlap size relative to head size). If there’s a ruler or object of known length in the photo that’s even better.
-The photo should be close to a side-view profile (give or take no more than about 10 degrees angle in any direction).
-At a minimum, identify the species and the approximate location (country or island). Please do include any extra information you can share (e.g. date, latitude/longitude/altitude, snout-vent length of anole, weather…), but I know this may not be available for all the photos.
Clearly I’m new to this – any photo better than this one should be useable.
Check out the comments section of this post for some better examples.
If you have one or more suitable photos you can contribute, please send them to me as an attachment to an e-mail. If you have large files or many photos (more than ~5MB) that may not make it through e-mail servers, drop me a line and I’ll send you a link to a Dropbox folder instead. If you are willing to give permission to use the photo (with full credit, of course) in potential blog posts, web pages (e.g. Encyclopedia of Life entries), or publications, please say so in the e-mail; otherwise I will only use the photos to extract basic measurements.
Lot of talk on this site about the deserved prevalence of anoles on the cover of major periodicals (most recently here). I thought it might be useful to remember what I consider to be the greatest anole cover of all time. The answer, incidentally, is “no.” And the species? Anolis garmani from Jamaica.
Previously, I reviewed what we currently know about anole fossils – these fossils are preserved in amber, a fossilised tree sap/resin from Mexico and the Dominican Republic (like the one pictured right). Today, I want to share how I have been using high resolution x-ray computed tomography, a.k.a CT scanning to look at these fossils and so peer into the past.
Background to CT scanning Amber
CT scanning involves x-raying an object from many angles, and then compiling these x-rays to reconstruct 3D models of the object (more detailed description here). CT scanning works when the object being scanned is made of different materials that each absorb x-rays differently. Think of a medical x-ray; skin absorbs far fewer x-rays than bone, so the two show up as different shades of grey on the developed x-ray.
The inclusions in amber are usually subfossils, where organic material still remains (e.g., bone).
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