Category: Education and Anoles Page 3 of 4

Darwin Day Herp Tour, Museum of Comparative Zoology, 2011

Attention Boston-area Anolophiles – This Friday, November 9th, the Harvard University Biological Sciences Society (HUBSS) is hosting its annual Night at the Museum event! This free and recurring event at the Harvard Museum of Natural History features plenty of tasty treats, exciting exhibits, and exclusive behind-the-scenes tours of the research collections in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Although the event is sponsored and hosted by the undergraduate society, interested members of the public are welcome to participate.

As part of this event, I will be giving two free tours of the Herpetology collections. I love working for these events because I get to display my favorite pieces from our amazing collections, including enormous croc skulls, strange and rare reptiles, and, naturally, a dizzying array of anoles. Anoles will be featured prominently in my tours as I use them to illustrate the principles of convergent evolution and to talk about island biogeography. Visitors will get to participate in a team activity using Anolis specimens. If you’re in the area, how else would you rather spend a Friday night than learning about anoles?

Check out the HUBSS website for this event and I hope to see you there!

While conducting field work in the Dominican Republic, we recently took a morning off to go for a hike to a nearby waterfall, the beautiful Salto de Jimenoa. I was surprised to find several educational signs about the forest posted along the trail, covering topics including land use history, geology, and, most importantly, flora and fauna. Nestled in a paragraph about reptiles and amphibians, it noted the following (in Spanish, English, French, and German, no less!): “The amphibians are represented by lizards and frogs… A good observer can see lizards of the Anolis species jumping from the trees or walking on the ground and birds can be appreciated.” While some of the biology might not have translated very well, it was good to see anoles getting the shout-out they deserve!

These anoles were featured on interpretive signage in the Dominican Republic.

Read all about Project Noah, a citizen science initiative, and their recent good judgment in featuring Anolis.

Previous contributors have discussed the use of Anolis as an educational tool at the K-12 level (see here and here). But what happens when teachers don’t take anoles to the students? The answer is quite simple: the kids bring the anoles to them! Alex C., a sixth grader who recently graduated from my brother’s fifth grade class in PA, just passed along a “Discovery Quest” presentation that he created for fun (and to learn, of course). The topic: Green Anoles! I think it’s safe to say that our favorite lizards have so effectively permeated mainstream culture that the recruitment of anole biologists should prove an easy task from here on out. We look forward to having you in the field in about a decade, Alex C. (and all you other future anole experts)!

Anyone else with stories of anole addictions beginning at a young age? These can be auto-biographical or about those you know!

iNaturalist.org is an on-line community for naturalists where you can “record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world.”  We’ve teamed with iNaturalist to provide a new anole-specific widget that allows our readers to see previously reported anole records and add records of their own to iNaturalist’s growing on-line database.  Check out our new Citizen Science page to give the iNaturalist widget a spin!