Category: New Research Page 58 of 67

Incubating A. sagrei eggs.

Anyone who has incubated reptile eggs knows that moisture is important. Without sufficient moisture, eggs quickly desiccate and shrivel beyond any chance of returning to a healthy, turgid state. Because of this, eggs must experience positive water balance during most of the incubation period for successful embryonic development, and the relative moisture content of the incubation medium can greatly impact how much water is taken up by eggs. In turn, this will affect embryonic metabolism and will have important effects on hatchling size.

Those of us who have incubated thousands of reptile eggs have probably come across the occasional ‘odd ball’ that swells up at a healthy rate, but never hatches, and upon dissection nothing but water and yolk oozes out with no sign of an embryo.

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With the the deadline quickly approaching, the National Science Foundation‘s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (NSF DDIG) program is on the mind on many graduate student anologists (myself included).  These grants provide significant funding (up to $15,000 this year) to graduate students allowing them to expand upon their existing dissertation research. A large part of my preparation has been reading the successful proposals of other students.  That got me to wondering how many other anole-centric proposals have been funded recently.  Luckily, the NSF has a handy search function for just such a question.

I found 16 funded projects since 1987 coming from the labs of 9 PIs (8 of whom have a single funded student each – the 9th PI and most of his 8 funded students post here often).  In total, students of anole science have been awarded $167,306 with a substantial uptick in the last few years. Here’s hoping this trend continues.  Good luck to all applying this year.

Anolis mariarum from https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.111687092219097.16289.111684688886004&type=1

Brian Bock and colleagues, most at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, have published a series of papers on two populations of the high elevation anole, Anolis mariarum. The most recent in this series, just out in the journal Caldasia, is an examination of the reproductive cycle of this species.

In Central America, many anoles that occur in areas with a single long dry season curtail their reproduction during the dry times. However, A. mariarum occurs in areas where there are two wet and two dry seasons over the course of the year, and this species breeds year round, as does another highland anole in a similar place climatically, A. (Phenacosaurus) heterodermus.  The authors suggest that because each of the dry times are shorter than one long dry season, these species are able to continue breeding. But, as the authors note, a confounding factor is that these two species occur at very high elevations (> 2200 meters), where temperatures are much cooler than most species that have been studied. Despite a considerable amount of work on anole reproductive phenology, there is still much to learn.

What have I done? Capuchin monkey photo https://www.anoleannals.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/capuchinmonkey011.jpg?w=300

Sure they’re cute, but in reality they are anole-killing machines. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but at least some monkeys will eat just about anything, and I was once told of a capuchin that caught a large anole (A. frenatus), held it by its hindparts and smacked its head repeatedly against a branch to dispatch it, and then ate it. This is why life is so tough for mainland anoles–there are so many critters out there trying to eat them.

Any way, that brings me to the subject of this post. In a recent Natural History Note in Herpetological Review (Vol. 42, pp.432-433), Cassimiro and Pereira Martins report an observation of a crested capuchin monkey (Cebus robustus) eating a Polychrus marmoratus, which ironically has the common name of “monkey lizard.” Although we now know that Polychrus is not the sister group of anoles, still, if a monkey’s eating monkey lizards, it’s probably eating anoles, too. And, in any case, we at Anole Annals are not going to discriminate against the poor monkey lizards just because they’ve lost their special status as almost-anoles, and hence we will continue to report from time to time on late breaking developments in the monkey lizard world.

In this day of online publication of papers, the significance of the actual appearance of a journal’s latest issue, with an article right there, in ink on paper, has greatly lessened. Nonetheless, I, for one, still consider that moment to be the official publication of a paper. And in that vein, the anole genome paper officially appeared in this week’s issue of Nature. It’s freely downloadable here.