Photo of a dew-covered A. carolinensis by Jude Haase at http://500px.com/photo/2565902?from=popular
Category: All Posts Page 149 of 153
Afternoon to all, I thought I would introduce myself with a few photos to get some identification clarification. The first one was sent by a friend (Tanis Birch) who is traveling in Belize (Punta Gorda). I have not been to Belize and have limited experience with anoles but my best guess was Anolis sagrei. Are there any similar looking anoles which I am not taking into consideration? Any thoughts?
But don’t believe us. Listen to satisfied AA poster Ashli Moore, who writes about her recent post (which has been viewed 625 times):
“Putting this up on the Anole Annals site was a great decision; I’m certain nobody would have noticed this paper otherwise! I want to thank you again for bringing this site to my attention and for allowing me to post.”
AA welcomes new posters. It’s really not that hard–you know what you did, just whip out a few paragraphs summarizing it. And it’s a great way to present the back-story behind the paper you published (or the project you’re working on). To find out how, check out the instructions here.
For example, we’re proud to be the first “related link” on this post.
Yes, it’s true. A “third eye” does exist, not only in the ancient Hindu literature and the new age imagination, but in birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, lampreys, and hagfishes. We’re talking about the pineal gland, a small organ located on top of the brain, just underneath the surface of the skull. Although it doesn’t have visual capabilities in the image-forming sense, it is intrinsically photosensitive, responding to light signals without any help from the lateral eyes. (Mammals, including humans, have a pineal gland too…but it has lost the ability to detect light).
You can see the parietal eye on top of this anole’s head (it’s the tiny circle in the middle). The pineal gland can’t be seen externally, but it’s just posterior to the parietal eye and right underneath the surface of the skull. Photo credit: TheAlphaWolf, License:Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Anoles, and some other lizards, actually have two “third eyes,” one being the pineal gland, and the other being the parietal eye, which can be seen in the picture above.
ok, the little screen.
The sequencing of the genome of the green anole (Anolis carolinensis) is a landmark in the age of genomics, and a highpoint in the annals of anole studies. It is the first complete genome sequence of a reptile, and a great step forward in the development of comparative genomics. Results are already coming in: Matthew Fujita, Scott Edwards and Chris Ponting have a paper in press in Genome Biology and Evolution, using an earlier release of the anole genome, showing that the green anole genome lacks the large guanine-cytosine rich regions (called isochores) that are characteristic of birds and mammals. Is this lack unique to the green anole, or a feature of some larger group? We don’t know, of course, because the green anole is the first non-avian/non-mammalian amniote to be sequenced, but it is a hint of new things to come. As Rich Glor put it in his commentary here at Anole Annals,
Fujita et al.’s work is a good example of the insight offered by comparative genome sequencing; as the number of available genomes expands, this work is sure to continue to challenge overly simplistic assumptions about genome architecture and evolution derived from biased sampling of the tree of life.
Green Anole, Anolis carolinensis, New Orleans, LA. Note the expanded subdigital toepads.
So why was an anole chosen to be the first reptile sequenced? The short answer is that, among a small group of candidate species of reptiles announced by the NIH in May of 2005, the response of the biological community favored the green anole over the garter snake. But the longer answer includes why the community preferred the green anole: it has long been the subject of diverse physiological, behavioral, ecological, and other studies (a “model” organism in the functional biology sense), and, more importantly, anoles in general have been favored and favorable materials for a diverse array of physiological, behavioral, ecological, evolutionary, and zoogeographic studies over many decades. The goal of this post is to review a bit of the rich history of anole studies to provide some background on why so many researchers have found anoles to be vastly interesting animals.
Doesn’t look good. Staniel and particularly Abaco are right in the path of Irene–Category III for Abaco. Hang in there, lizards and people!
Over the years, many talks on anole dewlaps have featured an image from Nicholson et al.’s 2007 paper from PLoS One on anole dewlap evolution (I saw this image at least once at JMIH this year). Now that its been almost five years since this image was published, I think its time we came up with a new collage of anole dewlaps. Which dewlaps should we include? Who’s got dewlap photos to share for the effort? If you’ve got some nice photos to share for the collage please post them here at Anole Annals and I’ll put them all together to generate our anole community dewlap collage! See the guidelines for posting for instructions on how to post images as part of a comment. (For my part, I’ve accumulated lots of photos from the Greater Antilles, but have almost nothing from the mainland or the Lesser Antilles.)