This is a video from the YouTube channel of the thetravelholics that I stumbled upon a while ago showing two male A. allisoni fighting.
Notice:
1.The male that had the upper hand turned brown while the losing male remained blue throughout the fight.
2.When the male turned brown some of the skin on the back of his neck remained blue, this is possibly an example of selective color change.
3.Both males had prominent shoulder patches and black patches behind the eyes.
There’s been discussion about blue anoles previously on Anole Annals, but I’ve come across yet another on the internet. The anole in the above picture is a species from the Sierra de Bahoruco in the Dominican republic. Apparently it has not been formally described yet and so does not yet have a name, but from the looks of it I would say it was related to A.alliniger or singularis. This actually leaves Puerto Rico as the only island without a blue trunk-crown anole. I have found one other picture of this species on Flickr (though it does not allow for posting on other web pages).
Below is another photo from the Anolis Contact Group, of yet another new species that appears to be related to singularis.
I’m a big fan of predation events, and after two and a half months of working with Sitana in a site bizarrely devoid of predators, I had high hopes for Miami. I was not disappointed, and on my second day, had the chance to watch this snake capture and eat a female Anolis sagrei. This happened in the grounds of the Florida International University, Biscayne Bay Campus, where I was collecting some preliminary data on A. sagrei territory overlap. The photo is from relatively early in the lizard consumption process, before the snake (a Southern Black Racer, Coluber constrictor priapus) turned the lizard around and swallowed it head first.
I initially thought the anole was A. distichus, which are abundant in the area where I saw the snake. On seeing that it was in fact A. sagrei, I realised that I might have unwittingly played a role in the lizard’s demise. I had in fact been trying to catch a female A. sagrei in the vicinity myself, and must have chased her right into the grasp of this snake! I like to think of the situation as my having facilitated the snake’s successful capture, and not as being out-lizarded by a baby snake, but I know I’m just deluding myself…
Thanks to Gabe Gartner and James Stroud for identifying the snake.
I observed this (full size image) interaction in my backyard one afternoon while I was hunting for good pictures. All anoles tend to flee as I walk around my backyard, but some only retreat partially or temporarily. These two stayed relatively out in the open until I moved a little closer, causing one to flee in to the vicinity of the other one causing the event seen in the picture.
Anolis leachii enjoying life on balmy, tropical Antigua
One of the tell-tale signs that you’re in the tropics in the Western Hemisphere is the abundance of anoles scampering about on palm trees. Tropical anoles tend to get all the media attention. The lowland tropical taxa are the anole media darlings, such as the jewel-toned Lesser Antillean anoles, the flashy trunk-crown anoles, such as A. allisoni, and the determined invaders, like A. sagrei. Personally, I’m a bigger fan of the montane anoles. These species tend to get less attention. They’re usually fairly drab in coloration and, by definition, they live in more inhospitable environments that are remote and difficult to access. These are the anoles that live where the 4×4 can’t penetrate, where the cold rain pounds even in the dead of summer, and where the lush tropical communities of the lowlands morph into endless stands of lonely pine trees.
And, even if they usually lack the pigmented pizazz of the lowland anoles, the montane species have a mystery that is all their own. How is it that lizards bearing a tropical ancestry can tolerate the harsh environments found at high elevation? Do they use behavior to mitigate the cold? Do they evolve their physiology? To date we still have more questions than answers, but as a community we’re slowly beginning to build our knowledge of what makes highland anoles tick.
A study by Gunther Köhler and colleagues in a recent issue of Herpetology Notes focuses on a truly enigmatic species, Anolis omiltemanus. To say this montane species from the Guerrero region of Mexico is poorly understood is an understatement. What little we know of A. omiltemanus comes from a handful of studies conducted a few decades ago. Beyond the fact that these lizards have been found in leaf litter and in small shrubs in the pine and oak forests near Omiltemi, very little is known about their ecology.
A male A. omiltemanus (top) and a female (bottom). Images are from Köhler et al. (2013)
A brown anole is caught up in the web of an Nephila orb-weaving spider
Anoles eating spiders and spiders turning the table on anoles are well reported in both the literature and here on Anole Annals (1, 2). Recently, biologists Sarah French and Matthew Wolak of UC Riverside encountered this unfortunate Anolis sagrei that had been caught up in the web of an Nephila orb-weaving spider. Here’s what they had to say about the enounter: “We were at the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton. Matt & I were walking down the boardwalk, totally creeped out by the abundance of spiders, when we encountered the anole caught in a web. He was still alive, but pretty well caught. The spider didn’t seem entirely sure what to do with it, but she seemed to occasionally bite it, which caused the anole to jerk & thrash about for a few seconds. It was hard not to feel sympathy for the anole, but native species trump exotic, and so we refrained from interfering! (But we also didn’t stick around for too long to watch).”
Anolis agassizi. Photo by Margarita Ramos.
Pat Shipman’s recent observations on a brown anole displaying at a fluttering orange flag, and her question about whether anyone has seen an anole paying particular attention to the color orange brings to mind the famous Chuckles experiment.
In the early 1970’s, a Smithsonian-led expedition visited remote Malpelo Island in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Colombia. To make a long story short, the researchers noted that the endemic A. agassizi, a very interesting species in its own right, seemed to have a thing for orange objects. To test this hypothesis, they turned to Chuckles, the hard jelly candy that comes in five colors, one of which is orange (and which, fortuitously, they had a package available on the ship on which they were based, there being no land accommodations on Malpelo).
Bottom line: the anoles do, indeed, prefer orange and yellow. Read all about it in this snippet, extracted from the article:
Rand, A.S., G.C. Gorman, and W.M. Rand. 1975. Natural history, behavior, and ecology of
Anolis agassizi. Smithsonian Contributions in Zoology 174:27–38.
I describe the experiment and an abortive attempt to follow up on it in Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree (footnote 189, p.146):
No discussion of anole frugivory and feeding behavior is complete without mention of the famous Chuckles® experiment. On an expedition to remote Malpelo Island off the coast of Colombia, Rand et al. (1975) noted that the native anole of the island, A. agassizi, was attracted to the orange cap of a bottle of suntan lotion and to the orange packaging for Kodak film, and would come running from great distances and in great numbers when half of an orange was placed on the ground. The intrepid biologists wondered whether these anoles had a particular predisposition to the color orange. Fortunately, the expedition was outfitted with packages of Chuckles®—billed as “America’s most popular jelly candy” in a 1949 advertisement—which conveniently contain candies in five colors: orange, yellow, red, green, and black. By placing various combinations of these sweets on the ground, the authors found that anoles are most attracted to orange and yellow candies, and least attracted to black ones.
But the story does not end there. In an effort to extend this research program to additional species, a graduate student in my laboratory tested a captive A. grahami with differently colored Starbursts®, a non-jellied candy that also comes in different colors (Chuckles® may not have been available in the local vending machine). Unfortunately, this experiment was stymied by other members of the lab, who removed lizard-bite sized pieces from the candies, thus briefly convincing the experimentalist that he was on to a major discovery.
A previous discussion on this blog has raised the following question: in which situations is a lizard most likely to lose its tail? Common wisdom has it that tails are most frequently lost in the avoidance of predators, and observational evidence backs this up, at least in the case of anoles–no AA reader has observed tail loss in a male-male aggressive interaction. But what about other lizards?
In Sitana ponticeriana, an agamid lizard that I often post about on this blog, a couple of observations point to the likelihood of male-male competition as a driver of tail loss. Tail loss is not uncommon–in the locality I have sampled best, 13.5% of lizards have lost their tails. Males are about 1.7 times as likely to lose their tails as females (16.5% of males vs. 9.6% of females). Further, lizard predators aren’t too common in this locality–fewer than 30 individuals of potential lizard predator species were spotted or heard in over two months of sampling, and no predation attempts were observed.
But more excitingly, I had the chance to observe firsthand the loss of a tail during a male-male fight this summer! The resident lizard had lost much of his tail prior to the fight, a measly 5.4 cm remaining. The intruder, however, had an almost complete tail. Here is a rather blurred photo of the two males facing each other:
In his beautiful monograph on anoles of Guadeloupe (A. marmoratus ssp), Lazell (1964, 1972) showed the existence of a large variability of phenotypes and described six subspecies of Grande-Terre and Basse-Terre , i.e. A. m. inornatus, A. m. speciosus, A. m. setosus, A. m. girafus, A. m. alliaceus and A. m. marmoratus (see my previous post “The anoles of Guadeloupe“). However, as Lazell indicated Lazell in 1964, “there exists between two distinct populations occupying different geographic areas a zone in which “intergrade” individuals assure continuous gene flow betweens the two extremes.” In other words, the classical subspecies could be considered as extremes that would be relatively few relative to the entire population of Guadeloupe anoles.
Within the framework of a project funded by the National Park of Guadeloupe and the University of Lyon (France) and in collaboration with the DEAL of Guadeloupe, we have identified this year the population of anoles on Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre. 120 stations distributed over the entire territory were studied. 687 anoles were characterized and 260 genetic samples were taken. This study demonstrated the existence of extreme variability of phenotypes between stations and within each station, with a minority representation of the subspecies classically described in the literature. This variability is represented by the poster below. This result leads us therefore to question the relevance of currently distinguished A. marmoratus subspecies as well as on the work of the field experimenter. What should be the selection criterion to select an individual on a station? Should it be random regardless of the phenotype, or should we select the one that is closest to the referenced phenotype, although this phenotype is a minority within the population?
AA reader Angel Sosa sends the attached photo and writes: ‘During monitoring of amphibians and reptiles in Cerro Azul region of Alto Chagres, Panama, I photographed three moth flies on the back of Anolis lionotus. The moth flies had bellies full of blood, which is clearly seen in the photograph. It’s the first time I have seen this group of arthropods feeding on a reptile. This is an endemic area of leishmaniasis, but little is known of the ecology of parasites in reptiles and their medical importance.”
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