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!
Category: All Posts Page 146 of 153
A. smallwoodi
C. barbatus
C. porcus
A. smallwoodi
A. smallwoodi
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
Greetings, Anole Annals readers, from sunny Miami, Florida. For my first post I wanted to share with you an illustration I did of several Venezuelan anoles, which appeared in the latest 2011 issue of Herpetological Review. I thought this illustration would give readers an opportunity to take a peek at the diverse, but often overlooked anole fauna of northern South America.
1.—Anolis tropidogaster (male). This small, little-known anole is somewhat similar in behavior to the species associated with A. chrysolepis. In fact, it is the predominant “not very arboreal” anole in forests west of the Andes in Venezuela, where A. planiceps is not found. Females have a rudimentary dewlap.
2.—Anolis fuscoauratus (male).
Mystery lizard
Here’s a lousy photo of its dewlap, in case that helps.
lousy photo of dewlap
Many editors have recently come to acknowledge that an anole on a book or journal cover generates much enthusiasm from the community (here, here, here, here, here, here and here– I hope that I didn’t miss any). The trend continues in the February issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society. In this issue Sanger et al. describe the developmental bases of limb length convergence among trunk-ground and trunk-crown habitat specialists (previously described on Anole Annals). It should be noted that the only thing that can possibly trump the beauty and eloquence of an anole in its native environment are developmental series of anole embryos (see here for further proof)
Better late than never.