The Brodie Lab at the University of Virginia has developed a manual for breeding and raising anoles in lab colonies, entitled “Anolis Colony Care: A manual developed for the Brodie laboratory at University of Virginia.”
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With the genome of green anole available for download, anole researchers are apt to face a dilemma related to both experimental design and the taste and judgment of science consumers. My colleagues and I recently published an article in Genome Biology and Evolution in which the anole genome was downloaded for analyses. Spearheaded by bioinformatics guru Charles Chapus, our experiments were conducted in silico. Through conversations with friends and colleagues, we intuited that we might face resistance to our methods because, although our hypotheses and analyses were novel, our raw data were not. Fortunately, this concern, held by some, did not postpone publication of our work, but it did raise an interesting point for discussion. Where is genomic research going, in relation to generation and/or analysis of sequence data? From the perspective of experimental design, the decision to generate new sequence depends on the research question. For population genetics studies, for example, novel sequence generation is efficacious but for whole genome comparisons, why repeat what is freely available for download?
Have you published work based on pre-existing data? How will you decide whether to amplify or download anole sequences for analyses?
Here are three photographs I took of brown anoles preying on lepidopterans. In our diet studies lepidopterans were one of the main prey types, although, as can be expected, the larvae outnumbered the adults as prey. Amazingly, the lizards even ate larvae that had hair, which would cause an irritating burning sensation if it comes in contact with your skin.
The University of California Museum of Paleontology has a wonderful website on evolution education, including a number of classroom exercises. One of these focuses on using phylogeny to understand the evolution of the Greater Antillean ecomorphs.
I was wondering if anyone has some good information, published or otherwise, on the normal values found within a blood sample for an anolis species? We have been doing some sampling within our collection and are looking for something with which to compare our results. We have Chamaeleolis porcus, barbatus, and chamaeleonides, as well as Anolis ricordi and smallwoodi. The blood samples that we have taken are all from our porcus. The only values that our vets currently have to compare to are those from a veiled chameleon, and being an old world species, I don’t know how well that translates to Anolis. The calcium phosphorus ratio looks pretty close to normal, but the calcium level is almost three times as high as we expected. Is this possibly normal for a lizard that is a snail specialist? Any other information that you could give me would also be much appreciated.
Thank you for any help,
Will
It turns out that Anole Annals isn’t the only member of the WordPress.com stable that has a thing for our favorite lizard. While recently doing some tag surfing, we came across the following posts.
Catholic mom tells the gripping (or not) story of a green anole that went for a ride on the minivan windshield. You can probably guess the outcome, but the photos are nifty.
The long awaited paper describing the genome sequencing of Anolis carolinensis was submitted for publication on Thursday. Containing seven figures and with 50 authors, the paper is an epic step forward in our understanding of anole genetics. Stay posted for updates as the story develops.
From the back cover: “Anolis lizards have been used in the development and testing of fundamental theories in ecology and evolution, and they have served as important models in behavioral ecology.” The cover photo is credited to Dan Warner.
Figure 1 from Pauw (2006)
Anton Pauw of Stellenbosch University in South Africa writes:
“I am reading Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree and find it fascinating to see how many parallels there are with my one of my study systems, oil-secreting orchids. While the anoles have differentiated across a series of niches provided by a plant, the orchids have differentiated across a series of niches provided by an animal. The orchids segregate the body of the shared pollinator among them so that each places its pollen on a unique segment of the oil-collecting bee. Orchid speciation generally involves shifts between bee species (with placement site conserved), but some speciation also occurs through shift in pollen placement site within the bee , so that sister species occupy for example the first and second segment of the front leg respectively. Anyway, I thought that you too might find these parallels interesting, so I have attached two papers on the topic. I like the comparison of your Fig. 3.2 with Fig. 1 in the attached 2006 paper.”
The other paper is here. Incidentally, apparently no one has posted a picture of an anole sitting on an orchid on the internet.
Photo from http://www.petworldshop.com/
We’ve had a number of posts in recent months on the remarkable variety of anole species available in the pet trade (for example, here and here), particularly in the Europe. Another aspect of the pet trade, however, is the volume at which it occurs, and in this case, it is probably a few common species that make up the bulk of the trade. A recent paper in the Herpetological Journal explored reptile and amphibian commerce in Great Britain over a ten-year period from the mid-1990’s to mid-2000’s. The paper has some interesting points on various aspects of the dynamics of the trade, including how price has changed, the role of captive breeding, and other points. Anoles aren’t a central focus of this paper, but it does report that the price of anoles has increased over time, even after correcting for inflation: 26% in both A. carolinensis and A. sagrei, but only 4% in A. equestris. This was about middle of the pack for lizard species surveyed. Some had become more expensive—more than 400% more in Parson’s chameleon—but about half the species had become cheaper, green iguanas dropping by 69% at the other extreme.
I summarized what I could learn about the anole trade in Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree. It isn’t much, but here’s what I had to say: From 1998–2002, more than 250,000 A. carolinensis and more than 100,000 A. sagrei were legally exported from the United States; in the same period, as many as 30,000 anoles of various species may have been imported into the U.S. Figures for imports into other countries are unavailable, but may be large because there are many reptile hobbyists in Europe. The United States is the only country likely to have much domestic trade in anoles, and these numbers, too, are great because many A. carolinensis and A. sagrei are captured and sold within the United States, not only for the pet trade, but also to laboratories, educational supply companies, and zoos. Data on the magnitude of this trade is scarce, but more than 250,000 anoles were collected in Florida in a four-year period in the early 1990s (this number may be a substantial underestimate because dealers were not required to report the number of the introduced A. sagrei and as a result, most did not do so.). in Louisiana, nearly a million A. carolinensis a year were collected in the mid-1990s, but that number has declined to around 350,000 per year in 2006, apparently as a result of declining demand, rather than shortage of anoles.