Manuel Leal’s fascinating studies showing that anoles have more going on than anyone would have expected is featured in a new Canadian TV documentary. The Nature of Things is a well known series hosted by the inimitable David Suzuki. This episode on the cognitive abilities is wide-ranging and has all the usual suspects (chimps, crows, etc.)…and anoles! Not to mention Manuel Leal. Unfortunately, the series can only be accessed online if you’re in Canada, but the rest of us can see a snippet on the post on Chipojolab, as well as a “behind-the-scenes” discussion of the film crew’s visit to Leal’s lab.
The Invasive Species Specialist Group, a Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), recently gave the weekly top honor to our favorite greenie. We love ’em here in the U.S., but as we’ve documented many times, they can be a problem elsewhere. A pdf of the picture above is available at the ISSG site.
BBC host Michael Mosley with a Jamaican anole he captured
Our local PBS station has been airing episodes of the entertaining 2010 BBC series The Story of Science: Power, Proof, and Passion, hosted by medical journalist and doctor Micheal Mosley. The program recounts the history of major advances in science by focusing on the individuals responsible for them.
Episode Three, “How did we get here?”, tracks Evolutionary theory, from the development of geology, through Cuvier’s advances in comparative morphology and on to the field work that kickstarted Darwin and Wallace’s thought processes. In this episode Mosley follows in the footsteps of early collector Hans Sloane. Sloane, as you will recall from a previous post, assembled an expansive collection of Jamaican flora and fauna including anoles.
There is a brief segment where Mosley and his botanist guide construct small nooses and capture an anole, pictured above. I don’t know the Jamaican fauna well, but my guess is that he’s got A. lineatopus.Unfortunately I can’t find any video clips and the only picture available (above) is pretty grainy. If you’ve seen the episode or if you can make out the species from the picture above, let me know if I’m close in the comments.
UPDATE: The anole segment is online! Thanks to Jonathan for sleuthing this out.
At least vicariously. Track & field aficionado Kevin de Queiroz pointed out that A. aeneus featured prominently in this profile of Grenadian gold medal sprinter Kirani James. Check out at about the 1:00 mark above, or 0:53 in the nicer, official NBC version, but one requiring you to watch a short commercial first.
My brother just sent me the Spring 2012 issue of the Temple University magazine, a quarterly publication the university sends to alumni and donors. The cover story features the biomechanics research of Dr. Tonia Hsieh and describes the various animal taxa her lab uses to ask questions about animal locomotion in challenging environments. This work, also featured in a January article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, has a wide variety of potential applications ranging from the development of nimble robots to suggestions for how to prevent slips and falls among the elderly.
The article and some accompanying online material are a quick, interesting read and contain some great images and videos. Although other taxa get all the glamor shots, the article does describe how a lab colony of Anolis carolinensis is used study how animals recover and maintain their balance when navigating slippery surfaces.
Anolis natural selection expert and comparative methods guru Liam Revell was today awarded a prestigious Young Investigators Prize from the American Society of Naturalists. The award recognizes Liam’s pathbreaking work advancing the development of statistical methods that incorporate information on phylogenetic relationships into the study of evolutionary diversification, as well as the work he has done studying the role of natural selection in shaping evolutionary direction in anoles.
Liam’s talk first highlighted the important new directions his research is taking in studying adaptation in urban anole populations, as well as in the evolutionary diversity of Caribbean boas, before focusing on the various methodological and analytical advances he has pioneered.
Photo of S. arenicolus by Michael T. Hill from a U. S. Fish and Wildlife handout: http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/newmexico/documents/Dunes_Sagebrush_Lizards_Handout.pdf
An article in Wednesday’s NY Times reported mixed results from efforts to conserve the rare dunes sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus arenicolus [formerly S. graciosus arenicolus]). Politics and oil interests are keeping the species off the endangered species list, but the Obama administration has reached a “conservation agreement” that ensures protection for most of the species’s range. For those interested in delving into the science underlying this story in a bit more detail, some recent peer-reviewed work on this species address the impact of oil and gas development on lizard populations (Smolensky & Fitzgerald 2011), the effectiveness of alternative sampling strategies (Smolensky & Fitzgerald 2010), and genetic diversity within and among populations (Chan et al. 2009). Smolensky and Fitzgeralds (2011) study of lizard abundances across a variable landscape paints a complicated picture suggesting that several different landscape variables likely impact the lizards, but they surely delighted the oil and gas industry with the following quote: “we did not find clear statistical evidence to support our hypotheses that oil and gas development at our study sites had a direct negative effect on quantity of habitat, quality of habitat, and populations of lizards. ” Chan et al.’s (2009) study of genetic diversity finds evidence for geographic genetic differentiation of some populations, but does not detect differentiation among individual sand dune blowouts. In any event, it’s not every day that our favorite type of critter makes it into the newspaper of record!
Martha Munoz hard at work in the lab of George Bakken at Indiana State University
Martha Muñoz recently posted on the development of methods to study lizard ecophysiology and her visit to Indiana State University to visit the lab of Dr. George Bakken to make copper lizard models. Turns out that Martha is now a celebrity in Terre Haute, and the ISU Newsroom has just written a very nice article about Martha, George, and anoles.
If this is Ron Paul, what ecomorph is Rick Santorum?
Holy smokes! It turns out that Republican electoral dynamics are completely explicable by reference to…Anolis lizard community ecology! So says noted Stanford ecologist Marc Feldman. Santorum, Paul and Romney are specialized to use different niches, and Gingrich apparently is a generalist that is having trouble competing with the specialists. Given that Feldman is from Stanford, he probably had the Lesser Antilles in mind, given the work of Joan Roughgarden. But given that there are three extant “specialists,” and that the Lesser Antilles never sport more than two species, comparison to the Greater Antilles is probably more apt, which leads to the question: which ecomorph do each of the candidates represent?
Previous posts and associated comments have discussed Scoliodentosaurophobia (here and here) and its prevalence in some anole-rich regions of the Caribbean. I’ve noticed similar attitudes in the US Southeast. In fact, a woman in South Carolina once begged me to kill all the “bugs” (juvenile A. carolinensis) in her bedroom because they disgusted her so much. One interesting way to counter this aversion may be through a public celebration and discussion of lizards. Yaihara Fortis Santiago did just this in an article recently published in El Nuevo Dia, which highlights the well-known lizards of Puerto Rico. Although the article focuses mainly on Sphaerodactylus and Saul Nava’s plans to replicate a recent experiment conducted by Duke’s Manuel Leal, you will notice that the featured photograph is not of a sphaero at all … it’s an anole! Still the world’s most beloved lizard.
Anyone else with links to articles about anoles published in their country of origin?
