Category: New Research Page 57 of 67

The International Congress on Vertebrate Morphology will be convening in Barcelona, Spain July 8–12, 2013. I have found past meetings extremely enjoyable with many exciting talks. How many from the anole community are considering attending?

The call for symposia for ICVM 10 was recently announced and the deadline for proposed symposia is April 15. With the growing number of labs studying anole development is it time to consider organizing an anole evo-devo symposium? What about a “reptilian” evo-devo symposium that brings together biologists working on other squamate, crocodilian, and turtle species? Perhaps its too soon or maybe another meeting? While mulling these ideas over I would appreciate hearing thoughts from others in the community. Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

A. cybotes juvenile. Photo courtesy of Thom Sanger

Apologies for the messiness of the formatting; this is my first blog post, and it only got here with a lot of technical support from JLo! History is full of examples of the little guy getting left behind. Unfortunately, so is the study of anoles. Most anole studies focus on adult lizards, and while there is certainly much to be learned from adult-focused studies, to ignore juveniles is to cheat ourselves of a great opportunity to better understand Anolis life history.

A. cybotes juvenile. Photo courtesy of Thom Sanger.

As readers of this blog likely appreciate, anoles are a model system for understanding evolution. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the factors that led to their stunning diversity, it’s important that we understand how selection acted upon these lizards at all stages of life – not just adulthood. A lizard has to survive from hatchling to reach adulthood and until we know more about how juveniles interact with their environment we cannot determine whether selection has shaped the juvenile stages with the same intensity as it has adult traits.

Thom Sanger wrote an earlier post that discussed the growth of Anolis limb length: “Growing Limbs – But Not the Kind With Leaves.” According to his post, variation in adult limb morphology can be traced “all the way back to the point in development when the cartilaginous long bone anlagen are just forming.”

This past summer, I worked with Thom, Michele Johnson (Trinity University), and Trinity undergraduates Ellee Cook and Diego Castro to study the morphology and behavior of juveniles on grounds of the Coral Sol Resort in Barahona, Dominican Republic. My goal was to understand whether juvenile lizards behave similarly to adults and whether juveniles have the same body proportions as adults.

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The cavalcade of new anole species continues with Gunter Köhler’s description of a new species, related to A. altae, from Costa Rica. The last few years have seen a steady progression of new species descriptions, almost all from Central and South America. Anolis must be pushing 400 species by now. Anyone got an up-to-date total?

And who’s described all these species? Rich Glor is in the midst of a five-part series identifying the big guns in Caribbean island species descriptions, but I reckon the mainlanders have been described by a very different crowd. Certainly in recent times Köhler, Poe and others must be up there, but it would be interesting to see who historically has been the most prolific. Perhaps a job for someone from Team Norops?

In any case, down to the nitty-gritty. What used to be known as A. altae has been divided now into seven allopatrically-distributed species at high elevations in Costa Rica.

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Polymorphism in dorsal patterns of female Anolis humilis. Color version of photo in Parmelaere et al., Biol. J. Linn. Soc. (2001), courtesy E. Parmelaere.

The topic of female dorsal pattern polymorphism has been broached several times in Anole Annals posts. Such polymorphism occurs in some species and not others; a comprehensive survey by Paemelaere et al. demonstrated that it was much more common in mainland anoles than in island species, and in some clades more than in others.

But the bigger question is: does dorsal pattern matter to the ladies?

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Thom’s recent post on the upcoming SICB meeting reminded me that I was yet to share the anole research I learned about at the Animal Behavior Meeting this past summer in Bloomington, Indiana. There were just a handful of presentations on herp research during the meeting, and I was excited to see that there were others presenting work on anoles:

Sarah Flanagan presented work from her Honors thesis with Catherine Bevier whereby she used mate choice experiments to test whether female Anolis sagrei prefer males with greater physiological capacities and/or higher quality territories. Sarah’s study showed that females preferred males with depleted liver glycogen (glycogen levels were measured in leg muscle and liver samples after mate choice trials). Females, however, did not show a preference for males in a territory filled with plants over males in bare territories.

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Geographic range of natural and introduced populations of Anolis sagrei. From Angetter et al. (2011).

The Cuban brown anole, Anolis sagrei, is indisputably the most successful of all Caribbean anoles. Not only is it found throughout almost all of Cuba at low elevations, but also everywhere in the Bahamas, on many islands in western Cuba, and even on the coast of Central America. Not surprisingly given its natural colonizing ability, the brown anole is the anole most widely introduced by humans as well, now established not only in Florida, but also on many islands in the Caribbean, as well as Taiwan, Hawaii and, most recently, Costa Rica.

What is surprising is how widely the brown anole has spread in North America. As the map above indicates, invasive populations have moved to areas much farther north than the species’ most northerly outpost in the Bahamas. One would think that Cuban anoles—or even Bahamian ones—would not be adapted to conditions in Georgia because environmental conditions are so different from those in Cuba.

To examine this idea, Angetter et al. conducted a species distribution modeling exercise to compare the environmental conditions that characterize the brown anole’s native range with that of its introduced range.

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