That’s right, it says so right here!
No surprise to us at AA, but greenies apparently provide yeoman service as garden pest control. And the wonderful folks at www.getmypestout. com provide all kinds of good advice about how to foster a healthy anole population in your garden. Good on ’em!
We’ve already received a lot of great entries, but there’s room for more! We’re reprinting the announcement below. Deadline is September 30, so submit today!
Last year we had an Anolis photo contest and produced a 2012 anole calendar. Both were wildly successful. Today, Anole Annals is pleased to announce it is combining both. We herewith announce the 2012 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 autographed copy of Karen Cusick’s lovely book, Lizards on the Fence. 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 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 photos 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 September 30, 2012.
As should be evident from several recent Anole Annals posts and comments, Nicholson and colleagues published a paper last week proposing that “It is time for a new classification of anoles.” Among a number of arguments in favor of splitting up the genus Anolis, Nicholson et al. (2012) argue that use of a single genus name hinders scientific communication about these animals. This argument has generated a lot of discussion (e.g., a post by Sanger, and two different threads of comments found here and here), and I thought it might be useful to continue the discussion with a bit of information about the usage of anole names in the scientific literature.
In a comment on an earlier post, Duellman argued that a genus name does not simply exist to reflect systematic knowledge – it’s a (hopefully stable) handle that conveys information about identity to a very wide audience, from laypersons to college students to ecologists, conservationists, and systematists. My impression has always been that this is especially true for Anolis – more so that for many other groups of organisms. For example, geckos are commonly known, even to scientists, by their common name “gecko,” and we find this term in paper titles and abstracts. I don’t think this is true for anoles – it seems to me that we more often simply call them “Anolis“.
To see if this is actually the case, I decided to pull some numbers from Web of Knowledge. I conducted a series of “Topic” searches for various taxonomic names, such as “Anole”, “Anolis“, “Gecko”, etc., and recorded the numbers of matching records for each search. Records include instances in which a term is found in the title, keywords, or abstract of any book or article recorded in the Web of Knowledge academic database. The numbers returned are reflective of my university’s library holdings (University of California), and will be different if conducted elsewhere; I also didn’t spend any time processing the results, but I don’t think that should qualitatively affect any results.
Previous posts on AA are engendering a lot of discussion about the proposal to reclassify Anolis into eight genera. Because most of the comments are critical, we felt the positive side of the case should be presented explicitly to AA readers. What follows is a summary of the arguments in favor of dividing Anolis into eight genera, drawn primarily from Nicholson et al.’s paper.
The argument for splitting Anolis is straightforward and is laid out clearly in the paper (p.13): “The role of systematics is to advance our understanding of biological diversity in the natural world. Its practitioners are the guardians of the knowledge produced by past generations and responsible for the rational interpretation of new data and their implications. Within this framework, phylogenetic inference has consequences that we think bind its practitioners to produce a systematic classification of the studied organisms. Such a classification must be founded on the inferred evolutionary relationships and dictated by the canon of monophyly. Following the above precepts, in conjunction with our phylogenetic analyses, we recognize eight major evolutionary units (genera) and twenty-two subunits (species groups) of dactyloid lizards (Figs. 4–5). The current practice (following Poe, 2004) of treating all dactyloids as comprising a single genus underemphasizes the evolutionary diversity within the family (as currently recognized) and obfuscates major biological differences among clades. In addition, simply because of the large size of the family (nearly 400 valid species), the single genus concept can be a hindrance to scientific communication regarding evolutionary events and directions of future research.”
In other words, the authors argue that failing to recognize structure within the anole clade obscures knowledge of phylogenetic relationships. If we can identify such clades, we should give them generic status to promote dissemination of this knowledge. Todd Jackman, though somewhat neutral in his stance, concurred with the rationale in a comment yesterday (comment #2): “I would like anyone working on anoles to know these eight groups, and to be familiar with the 22 subclades as well — but how to best achieve better knowledge of the phylogeny of anoles is not straightforward. Using subgeneric or clade names is fine, if they get used and get used often. If only taxonomists and serious tree-making anole workers use the names for these clades, then the phylogenetic information hasn’t been conveyed. Splitting up the genus…forces everyone to use more phylogenetically precise language.” Looked at another way, our best hypothesis of anole relationships reveals eight clades. By highlighting these clades with generic status, we explicitly put them forth as a hypothesis for future testing and potential falsification. The authors conclude that failing to do so stymies systematic progress (p.4): “Systematic progress in this regard has been delayed by an extremely conservative taxonomic approach to recognizing the diversity within the group and its extraordinarily ancient historical roots.”
In addition, a genus of 400 may be unwieldy. How can one easily distinguish anoles that are closely related from those that are more distant? Lumping them all in one genus might obscure information and thus obscure evolutionary patterns and lead to inefficient or even misguided choices in research design and interpretation.
Finally, retaining a large—and very old—genus Anolis runs counter to prevailing practice these days, which is to split rather finely, producing genera that are young in age and with relatively few species. As a result, Anolis is an outlier, being very old (100 million years plus, according to this paper). Some—we won’t name names—have been known to crow that Anolis is the most species-rich amniote genus, but that’s not very surprising if Anolis evolved tens of millions of years earlier than other genera. Many in the community feel that old genera should be split up, a view shared by AA reader Barnaby (currently comment #5 in the string).
For these reasons, Nicholson et al. suggest dividing Anolis into eight genera.
KIRSTEN E. NICHOLSON, BRIAN I. CROTHER, CRAIG GUYER & JAY M. SAVAGE (2012). It is time for a new classification of anoles (Squamata: Dactyloidae) Zootaxa, 3477, 1-108
Photo by Jonathan Losos
I’ve just learned of a website called Atyourservices. I don’t understand the point of this site, which seems to have a disparate range of topics, but one of the posts today is a nice compilation of sources of photos and information on Anolis aequatorialis.
From http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2012/09/17/amazing-social-life-of-green-iguana/
Here at Anole Annals, we occasionally digress to post on interesting topics in anole relatives. In that vein, I wish to call attention to a fascinating summary of the social complexity of Anolis‘s big green cousin, Iguana Iguana. Tetrapod Zoology, a fascinating source of information on all thing Tetrapodan, has a very interesting article which I highly recommend.
I’ll give one hint: it started something like this.
Those guys at Tropical Herping have done it again. Check out their new post with information and lovely photos of Anolis gemmosus, truly a gem of a lizard.
Distribution and occurrence data for Anolis sagrei from the Map of Life.
Ever wonder where you can find Anolis gorgonae? Or what about Anolis proboscis? How about some 25,000 other species? Well, then you might want to go have a look at the Map of Life (www.mappinglife.org). Even just casually perusing this web database for some odd species searches can be really eye-opening.
The Map of Life is an impressive and ambitious project that aims to map the distributions of all life on Earth. The database assembles and integrates different sources of data for species occurrences and distributions worldwide, including expert species range maps, locality information, ecological data, and maps from organizations like IUCN, WWF, and GBIF. Best of all, accessing this information is completely free to the public. The species distribution data are projected onto Google Earth maps, and users can select different map displays and toggle features on and off.
This is already a great resource, but the project team has plans to add even more features and more data in the future. With the increasing use of spatial and geographical data in ecological, evolutionary, and conservation research, projects like this are going to be extremely valuable for the scientific community.
Reference for the Map of Life vision paper:
Jetz W, McPherson JM, and Guralnick RP (2012) Integrating biodiversity distribution knowledge: toward a global map of life. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27:151-159.
AA reader, anole scientist, and anole breeder Veronika Holáňová has written a beautiful book on anole husbandry. I can attest that the photos are exquisite, and here’s what she has to say about it: “It is a book for all Anolis lovers who would like to try to keep them in captivity. In that book I have my experiences with keeping different anole species after many years :-).” The only catch is that it is in Czech, though Veronika says that “maybe one day it could be in English too.” Let’s hope! The book has a nice webpage from which it can be ordered.
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