From Yesterday’s Jeopardy round. Thanks to Joel McGlothlin for the videography, and Ian McGlothlin for the soundtrack. Note also Alex Trebek’s pronunciation of anole. And further note that Jeopardy has an understandable thing for anoles, having featured another anole question two years ago.
Category: All Posts Page 84 of 148
Scott Trageser posted this photo on Herpnation of Anolis leachii eating a gecko in Codrington, Barbuda. Here’s a few more details he sent while travelling in Madagascar: “The story was, I was photographing the gecko for a distribution note and the A. leachii came down and grabbed before I could even pull the shot off! The leachi would stay high in the trees so despite being large, we seldom saw them.”
Urban environments often create a diversity of novel habitats that differ from natural areas in thermal variance and spatial organization. Sometimes this results in a broader range of usable microhabitats for species able to thrive in human-disturbed areas. A few days ago I discovered such a microhabitat in an unlikely place. Last October, after getting mucked up seining for turtles in a slow moving Alabama stream, I quickly rinsed my muddy boots with a water hose and tossed them absentmindedly into a sunny spot to dry. There they remained until I went out a few days ago (January 30) with my daughter to look for green anoles coming out to enjoy a brief break in winter weather. Temperatures for the day were expected to reach the upper 60’s° F. Even in midwinter, green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) will sometimes emerge from their hibernacula to sun if the weather is right. As we walked outside, I noticed such an individual emerging from one of my steel-toe boots; he was covered in a dry layer of mud that most likely still lined the insole from my turtle trip last fall. He was quite sluggish so my daughter (3 ½) was able to inspect him for a moment before he got spooked and scurried off to a sunny brick wall some distance away. This was the only anole we found for several hours, so we called it quits and went looking for salamanders. Later that evening, once the sun was long down and temperatures had returned to a squamate-chilling 52° F, my skepticism got the best of me, and I returned to the boot for another look. After probing around a bit I found what I was looking for: a little green lizard had returned to bed down for the rest of the mild Alabama winter.
Photo from The Reptile Database.
Recently here in Trinidad, West Indies, I came across an Anolis aeneus. I observed the individual at 1930 h; sun had set at 1810 h. It was perched vertically on a wall, roughly 1 m off the ground facing down – as if in a foraging position. There was a bright light shining over it. I’m curious as to whether this type of behavior has been noted before; are these anoles also known to be active at night?
I was watching the new Amazon Prime Show, Mad Dogs. Episode 6 is called “Leslie” named after an Anolis cuvieri, which is a central character in the episode. I grabbed a screen shot of the animal, and then another screen shot with a character holding it. The show is set in Belize ( using my Anolis Forensics Skills I deduced it was not filmed there). I did verify later it was filmed in Puerto Rico.
This may be the most Anolis “screen time” I have ever seen in a movie or show. Anolis may be about to breakout into mainstream Pop Culture; keep an eye out for the Oscar – Best use of Anolis in a Major Motion Picture.
Read–and hear–Chris Austin of LSU tell all about Red Stick’s Green Anoles. Plus, the photo gallery has a nifty photo of a kestrel with a green anole in its talons.
Available as a print on Nadilyn Beato’s Etsy shop, along with lovely drawings of many other animals.
Your frugality has paid off! Through Wednesday, zazzle.com is having a 30% sale. That’s $15 per calendar. Stop missing appointments and get your calendar today. Code: SEMIYEARSALE
While you’re shopping on zazzle, check out the Anole Annals store there. All custom items are on sale for 30% off, including the ecomorph line of watches, ties, playing cards and more.
Leo Fleishman of Union College
Anoles are highly visual animals, and there’s no display more visual than the extension of a dewlap. To understand how anoles use their colorful dewlaps to communicate, we must understand how anoles perceive color. Leo Fleishman of Union College has set out to do just that.
In his standing-room-only talk at SICB, Leo explained the need for a species’ dewlap to be easily distinguishable both from the dewlaps of other sympatric species, and from the background colors in the habitat. He described how his team quantifies dewlap color and natural habitat light conditions to determine how colors are differentiated by the anole visual system. One general finding that has emerged from these studies is that species in dark habitats have evolved lighter dewlaps, and those in brighter habitats have evolved darker dewlaps.
How do these things work?
Leo also described how to differentiate anole visual signals using a color tetrahedron of anole perceptual color space. This tetrahedron is defined by the sensitivity of the four types of photoreceptors in anoles – cones that detect long wavelength, medium wavelength, short wavelength, and ultraviolet light. By plotting the spectral radiance of particular signals (for example, the dewlaps of two species) in the tetrahedron, you can determine how distinct two (or more) signals are in anole visual space. Further, this modeling approach allows us to determine the visibility of any dewlap in any environment!
Leo concluded his talk by describing one particularly cool way an anole can distinguish its dewlap in a low-light habitat: the translucent dewlaps of some species that seem to almost glow in deeply shaded forests. You can read more about these glowing dewlaps in a recent Open Access paper published in Functional Ecology by Fleishman and colleagues.
John David Curlis presenting his poster in Portland.
Sexual size dimorphism can vary dramatically among populations, a pattern that may be due to sex-specific trade-offs between growth and maintenance. John David Curlis, a Masters student in Christian Cox’s lab at Georgia Southern and a former undergrad in Bob Cox’s lab at the University of Virginia, tested this hypothesis in two populations of brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) in the Bahamas. These two populations – one from Exuma, one from Eleuthera – differ in male but not female body size, and so they also differ in SSD. John David and the Drs. Cox thus predicted that the population of brown anoles from Exuma with faster male growth would have lower male resting metabolic rates than the population from Eleuthera with slower male growth. Since females on the two islands have similar growth rates, they predicted that females would have similar resting metabolic rates.
The team first found that the average metabolic rate was higher for males on Eleuthera than Exuma in both day and night, but this difference was not significant. As predicted, they did not find a difference between females of the two populations. They next tested whether metabolic rate differed between the populations at different temperatures, and found that Eleuthera males had higher metabolic rates at 25°C and 30°C, but not at 35°C. Again, females didn’t differ in metabolic rate at any temperature.
Altogether, the results of this study suggest that population differences in body size may be related to population differences in the allocation of energy between growth and metabolism, and interestingly, that these differences can be sex-specific.