Don’t think I’ve ever seen one this shade of turquoise. Anyone know where it’s from?
As we all know, 2012 has been designated the Year of the Lizard. To stay up-to-date on lizardy festivities, as well as to stay abreast of issues in lizard conservation, consult http://www.parcplace.org/news-a-events/year-of-the-lizard.html. The poster can be downloaded at that site as well.
I received this image from a friend of mine living in Panama. He asked me to identify the anole pictured for him. My immediate response back to him was Anolis insignis. However after looking at the animal I started to doubt my identification… the gular color seems to have too much yellow. I know that several of the Dactyloa group have been recently described, so this is possibly something new?
The photo is from Altos del Maria, cloud forest, a little east of El Valle, Panama.
Anyone dispute my ID? If so, what do you think?
Three years ago I received a message from Ray Huey asking me if I’d be interested in collaborating on an NSF grant to return to Puerto Rico and replicate the studies on Anolis thermal biology and ecology that we had conducted during the 1970s. The idea was to have the original investigators, including Ray, myself, and Paul Hertz, work in the same study areas, utilize the same techniques, and document changes that had occurred over the past 35-40 years. Our ultimate goal was to understand the impact of climate warming on Anolis populations over a range of habitats, from the Luquillo rainforest in northeastern Puerto Rico to the Guanica dry forest in the southwestern corner of the island.
We eventually received NSF funding for the project, and to date I have carried out field work in Luquillo and Guanica during July 2011 and January 2012. Andres Garcia, my long term colleague from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, joined me in Puerto Rico as a co-investigator on the grant. At the Luquillo study site, we successfully repeated all phases of the research I conducted in July 1976 and January 1977 (Lister, B. C. 1981. Seasonal niche relationships of rainforest anoles. Ecology 62(6):1548-1560). The major components of this study were (1) a July and January census of forest dwelling anoles (A. gundlachi, A. evermanni, and A. stratulus) (2) measurements of perch heights, perch diameters, and perch site insolation (3) recording of body temperatures for all forest species (4) sweep samples of the forest understory during both the winter and summer seasons (5) collection of male and female A. gundlachi for subsequent scoring of reproductive condition and stomach content analysis.
Comparison of our results with those of my previous study indicate significant changes in all of the above areas.
My husband and I are retired professors living part-time on Little Cayman, so we have come to know both A. sagrei and A. maynardi fairly well. Due to the dearth of information on the latter, we’re posting whatever we’ve got in hopes it helps someone or inspires someone. We have one, a large male, who sleeps most night on a ledge on the inside of our screen porch (he comes in a gap under the door). He goes to bed about 5:30-6 and wakes up around 8 am.
Anolis who sleeps on top of screen door frame
He is very regular in his habits & quite territorial — we watched him chase a smaller green anolis out of his sleeping ledge with much head bobbing and charges and this morning he smacked into another large male who had the affrontery to be sitting on his deck outside the screen porch! The other male either jumped off the deck or moved quickly to be underneath the deck.
We attach a few photos of two maynardi mating yesterday. Total encounter time was about 6 minutes.
Another view of anole sex
Both maynardi & sagrei drink from our bird bath regularly & follow me when I water the garden to drink off wet decks or leaves.
Calling all Boston-area anole enthusiasts! This Saturday I will be giving a lecture at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) through their Adult Classes program. I will be giving the first talk in a three-part “Topics in Evolution” series, and my focus will be on explaining Convergent Evolution, Adaptation, and Sexual Selection. We know that anoles are a fantastic model system for each of these topics, so you can expect that they will be prominently featured. I will discuss community convergence in Anolis lizards, provide laboratory exercises using ethanol-preserved specimens, and discuss anoles in the public galleries of the Museum. If you’re broadly interested in anoles and in evolution, this might be a fun event for you!
Well, I got with another Staff member here and took some photos for the header competition a while back, but we never got around to editing them in time. However, I have them now and thought I’d share them with you anyway. These are a few of the different species that we work with.
Will Baugher
First, congratulations to Ramon E. Martínez-Grimaldo for his overwhelming electoral majority in the Anole Photo Contest. His prize will soon be winging its way southward.
Second, the good people at zazzle.com have permitted us to drop the price of the 2012 Anole Calendar by 30%. Get ’em while supplies last! Go to http://www.zazzle.com/anoles_2012_calendar-158860158425229228 and use the coupon code ALLCALENDARS.
How are these two points related, you might wonder? The answer is easy. We will be having a contest for photos to include in the 2013 Anole Calendar with a nifty prize. So start snapping those pix and fire up Photoshop–the contest will come around before you know it!
For reasons I can’t recall, I stumbled across this stamp on the internet. There are three things wrong with this. What are they? Ok, one of them is more an oddity than a problem, and that’s a pretty easy one. But I bet no one can come up with either of the other two.
Clockwise from bottom left: Keats, Dickenson, Frost, You
Dear readers,
Here are the poems submitted to the Anole Annals Poetry Competition. We’ve decided to forgo public voting and merely list them for your enjoyment. For (to paraphrase), “poems are like gossamer, and one does not dissect gossamer.” Read on…
The Anolis Gene Nomenclature Committee (AGNC) recently held an open discussion regarding our ongoing efforts to develop Anolis as a model system for integrative biology* and genomics at SICB 2012 in Charlestown, SC. To facilitate further discussion from the community I wanted to post a summary of this meeting here. If anyone would like to add to this discussion or propose additional objectives or concerns please leave your comments below. This is an exciting and fast-paced time for Anolis biologists and discussions such as this are necessary to continue the productive development of this genus for research in a post-genomic era.
Ongoing efforts
The AGNC was formed to efficiently develop resources that will be useful to the Anolis research community. We opened the meeting with short presentations about our ongoing resource development efforts. Carlos Infante (UGA) described work from the Menke Lab to develop cell culture protocols that will be used to test transgenic constructs directly in anole tissues rather than distantly related model systems such as the mouse or chicken. He noted that they recently had promising results testing the piggyBac transposon system in cultured anole fibroblasts. Building on her poster presentation Jeanne Wilson-Rawls (ASU) described her experiences isolating and culturing satellite cells – small stem cells found in mature muscles – and her ongoing collaboration with Kenro Kusumi (ASU) studying the mechanisms of tail regeneration in A. carolinensis. Dr. Kusumi described a relatively new project aimed at obtaining genome and transcriptome sequences for A. apletophallus from Panama as part of a collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (also see this abstract from E. Hutchins). Dr. Kusumi also reminded the audience of their recent release of additional transcriptome data for mid-stage A. carolinensis embryos (available through NCBI).
One of the AGNC objectives is to aid in the dissemination of laboratory protocols, genomic data, and to create a pipeline for integrating data from multiple populations and species (see below). Several web-based resources are now being created along these lines. Tonia Hsieh and Rob Kulathinal (Temple Univ.) concluded this introduction by describing their efforts to develop Lizardbase, a web portal for geographic and genomic data mining. While still in its development phase the portal promises to become a useful tool for the anole research community and its public outreach efforts as data is added. To build this database Drs. Hsieh and Kulathinal are soliciting geo-tagged data for this portal and are in the process of adding a searchable database of contributors.
Looking forward – Goals for 2012
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