Category: Anole Photographs Page 8 of 9

Eric Enrique Flores de Gracia, a Panamanian graduate student based in the UK, sends in the following. Can anyone help?:

Besides my own Ph.D. research focus, I like to explore and monitor biodiversity of amphibians and reptiles among others, in the central mountains of Panama (part of the Talamanca eco-region). During a field campaign in the buffer zone of the Santa Fe National Park, we found a curious lizard on a Nispero (Terminalia amazonica) tree. Sadly, we were running out of time and only took the attached picture and since our main focus was not to survey herps at that moment, we released the lizard. I will appreciate if you have any clue as to what species it could be? By the way, we started a small monitoring program in 2011 in a never before explored area with some students from the University in Veraguas province.

You would have thought that Anolis allisoni couldn’t get any more handsome!

This one from Susan Perkins will be hard to top.

Ok, who recognizes this one? And does it look it’s a member of any of the ecomorph categories? You make the call!

Stephanie Zembillas, who posted this photo on Twitter and another on Tumblr, had this to say: “I wanted a picture of a moth, but an anole wanted lunch. We made a compromise.”

Good morning, Mr. Anole. Please get off my car.

Tweeted by Sugar Glitzcream from JenMang‘s Instagram photo.

Anolis bartschi photograph by Steven De Decker.

[Editor’s Note: the person who took this photograph is Steven De Decker; see comments after the first paragraph for corrected information]

As one of the seven or eight folks who judged the photos in this year’s AA photo contest I want to give some recognition to an image that didn’t even make the list of finalists determined by popular vote.  My judge’s choice award winner is a striking photograph of a juvenile of the Cuban endemic Anolis bartschi that was taken by Joe Burgess at Cueva del Indio, Vinales, Cuba. Although observed most frequently on rocks in karstic regions, individuals like this one are also commonly seen on trunks and other broad perches emerging from the karst beneath. The quality and clarity of this image are superb. The subtle colors along the animals spine and the steely blue of the eye and surrounding region are beautiful under natural light (perhaps complemented with a tactfully subtle fill flash?). A catch-light in the black eye gives the lizard some personality, and makes me wonder what it might be thinking. The right front forelimb is lifted off the trunk and possibility somewhat blurred by motion, impressing me with the animals agility and suggesting that its ready to make a move. This photo that makes me want to get out and find some anoles.

[Note from Jonathan Losos: I screwed up! There were two photos of A. bartschi entered into the photo contest, and when Rich asked for information on the A. bartschi photo, I gave him the info for the wrong one. The photo above was taken by Steven De Decker (who also took the grand prize winning photograph of A. allisoni). Steven had this to say about the photograph of the juvenile: “It was in the proximity of the prehistoric wall at Vinales, Pinar Del Rio. We were there with 2 local biologists who told us A. bartschi was pretty common to be found at the wall 10 years ago. Great was our disappointment when we saw that [the curly tailed lizard] Leiocephalus carinatus had taken over habitat near the wall. When we went back we decided to investigate some semi caves at the border of the park, and that’s where we found A. bartschi sitting on a trunk near the caves. And to answer your question, no I didn’t use a flash for this particular photo. Using the flash here would have given me a black background.
Meanwhile, below I’ve pasted the photo of A. bartschi by Joe Burgess (whose photo of an A. gorgonae took second place in the contest); this is the photo for which Rich gave info in his post above.

Good luck!

Could this be the all-time coolest anole dewlap?

As we all know, even though the diversity of anoles is greater on mainland Central and South America, we know a lot more about the island species. This extends even to simple matters such as resources for learning about and identifying species–for many mainland areas, it is hard to get information on the species that occur there, although this has changed in recent years.

Nowhere is this more true than in Mexico, an anologically rich area for which information on the anolifauna has not been brought together into a single compendium. Into this breach step Levi Gray, Steve Poe, and Adrian Nieto Montes de Oca, who have just produced a photo guide to the anoles of Mexico.

They recognize 46 species of Mexican anoles.  Of these 46, the authors and collaborators in the Poe Lab have caught 40 of them, including approximately 21 from their type localities, and field work this month is targetting three of the others.  The photos in the key are all from the authors, except the carolinensis photo provided by Alexis Harrison.  The key includes all Mexican anoles that the authors recognize (leaving out forms they consider unlikely to be valid–e.g., cumingi–or that have questionable status–e.g., utowanae).  The authors report that the well-known species schmidti, simmonsi, breedlovei, polyrhachis, microlepis and adleri are junior synonyms of other forms; these points will be discussed in a paper currently in review in Zootaxa; unfamiliar names in the key (e.g., rubiginosus) will be explained in that paper as well.

Below are low-resolution pictures of the guides; larger, downloadable pdfs can be accessed here. And I can’t help but adding: isn’t the diversity of dewlap colors and patterns incredible? I vote for sericeus as one of the greatest ever!

Well, the election is finally over, and the electoral results are awash with the color blue. More than 300 votes were cast in the semi-finals round, and then an all-star panel chose our winners from the top 12 in the popular vote. Perhaps surprisingly (perhaps not), the hoi polloi and the experts identified the same top three photos.

So now, with no further ado, the winner of the 2012 Anole Photo Contest is…

Read More