Hello anolers. A friend of mine named Ryan Killackey is making a documentary film about the Yasuni region of Ecuador, home to indigenous tribes and incredible biodiversity (including anoles!). The region is also, not surprisingly, under pressure for development and the film is documenting that struggle.
Anole Annals has certainly had its share of posts about anole sex (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4). Today I’m posting another photo of anoles having sex along with a rare shot of the immediate aftermath. As you can see in the photo on the right of a pair of Anolis chlorocyanus from the Dominican Republic, the male’s hemipenis generally remains exposed for a few a seconds after mating. During this time, the male tends to walks awkwardly away from the female while raising his pelvis off the substrate to get his junk in order.
Colombia holds more than 75 species of Anole lizards, making them the second most speciose vertebrate genus in our country next to the frog genus Pristimantis. Most species are shared with other countries of Central America and northern South America, but anoles have diverged in such an incredible way in Colombia that a large number of quite interesting and endemic species occur in the mountain highlands of the Andes, the insular portion of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean and the Chocó and Amazonian lowlands. Thirteen anole species have been registered for the Caribbean region, including lowlands and serranías. Most of these species have not been studied and the remaining habitats are disappearing at an accelerated rate, which is the reason why I find myself motivated to write this note, focusing on one of the least known neotropical lizard biotas.
Anolis Onca a desert sand dweller, Guajira, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Luis Alberto Rueda 2012
Sierra Nevada lonely twig anole. Anolis solitarius from Sierra Nevada de santa Marta (photo by Luis Alberto Rueda)
The Caribbean lowlands are one of the hottest and driest places in Colombia. This region extends from the northern Guajira deserts to the floodable plains of Cordoba. Its interior dominant habitats include seasonal dry forests, desert formations and riparian ecosystems. These habitats have been considered to be threatened by deforestation; only 1% of the dry forest formations still remain, which is why it is considered one of the most vulnerable ecosystems in the nation next to cloud forests and paramos. Islands can be those land surfaces surrounded by water or those which have simply been isolated preventing migration of dispersal-limited species such as small vertebrates. Islands as the San Andres archipelago and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta have been isolated for thousands of years in such a way that most of the fauna that inhabits them is endemic. Anoles are not the exception; three endemics are registered for the cloud forests of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Anolis santamartae, A. menta, A. solitarius) and two species for the San Andres and Providencia islands (Anolis Pinchoti, A. concolor).
My husband and I are retired professors living part-time on Little Cayman, so we have come to know both A. sagrei and A. maynardi fairly well. Due to the dearth of information on the latter, we’re posting whatever we’ve got in hopes it helps someone or inspires someone. We have one, a large male, who sleeps most night on a ledge on the inside of our screen porch (he comes in a gap under the door). He goes to bed about 5:30-6 and wakes up around 8 am.
Anolis who sleeps on top of screen door frame
He is very regular in his habits & quite territorial — we watched him chase a smaller green anolis out of his sleeping ledge with much head bobbing and charges and this morning he smacked into another large male who had the affrontery to be sitting on his deck outside the screen porch! The other male either jumped off the deck or moved quickly to be underneath the deck.
We attach a few photos of two maynardi mating yesterday. Total encounter time was about 6 minutes.
Another view of anole sex
Both maynardi & sagrei drink from our bird bath regularly & follow me when I water the garden to drink off wet decks or leaves.
Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery by Jennie Erin Smith is a page-turning historical account of the most notorious reptile smugglers in the United States. Many of the stories in Stolen World are derived from first-hand accounts provided by a core group of old-school smugglers, most notably Hank Molt and Tom Crutchfield. I was shocked at how open these folks were about their practices, particular given that some of them are still actively collecting, importing, and selling rare reptiles. Indeed, some of the book’s primary subjects now seem to regret their decision to share so much with Smith (I’ll return to this point later).
A view of the volcano as seen from the abandoned town of Richmond Hill. Photo: Jim Hewlett
As “anolologists” we think of the Lesser Antilles as one of the major treasure troves of colorful and extravagant lizards. They have been the subject of many AA posts (here, here, here, and here, among others). While gazing at anoles dewlapping in swaying palm trees, it’s easy to forget that the Lesser Antilles are a volcanic arc. However, on the tiny island of Montserrat where Anolis lividus is found, the volcano is alive and active. After a long dormancy the volcano awoke in 1995 and, within only a few weeks of activity, the capital city of Plymouth and surrounding areas were carpeted in several meters of pyroclastic material. Today Plymouth is a modern-day Pompeii. Plymouth is also the type locality for Anolis lividus, a charismatic medium-sized lizard from the bimaculatus clade of Lesser Antillean anoles. It was extraordinarily abundant in Plymouth and surrounding areas, according to Skip Lazell’s 1972 monograph in the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Since 2009 I’ve been surveying this lizard across the island, and have tried to find it as close to the volcano as I can get.
Anolis lineatus. Photo by Jonathan Losos
Matt Brandley recently posted on the remarkable anole of Curaçao, Anolis lineatus, which is notable for having a dewlap that is different on its two sides. Taking advantage of an invitation to participate in a conference in Aruba in January (the travails of life as a scientist), I’ve come to Curaçao to check up on this lizard, which I’ve never previously seen. The dewlap situation sounds remarkable, but there’s a second reason this species is of interest.
Many islands in the Lesser Antilles are home to only one anole species, and the anoles on these islands are renowned for the extent of their convergent evolution to each other and to trunk-crown anoles of the Greater Antilles. Schoener was the first to show that one-species island anoles tend to be remarkably similar in body size, a pattern reaffirmed most recently by Poe et al. The convergence extends beyond size, however, as these species also are very similar in their habitat use (similar to trunk-crown anoles in being arboreal but using a wide range of microhabitats) and their body proportions, such as the length of their limbs and the size of their toepads.
That leads to the question: is this a phenomenon solely of the Lesser Antilles and the two anole lineages that occur there (the bimaculatus Group anoles in the northern half of the island chain and the roquet Group in the south)? Or do solitary anoles anywhere converge on this pattern? Anolis lineatus is a particularly good test, because it comes from a lineage (the chrysolepis species group, about which we will hear more soon) that is not only distantly related to the other two, but is composed of anoles whose habitat and morphology are nothing like those of the solitary anoles.
So, I’m aiming to not only take a peek at lineatus’s throat fan, but also collect data on where it occurs and what it’s morphology looks like. First indications are that lineatus is a chunky anole, not unlike some solitary anoles such as marmoratus or oculatus, but perhaps more similar to trunk-ground anoles than to trunk-crowns.
Habitat-wise, though, lineatus is clearly a surprise—it’s not very arboreal, at least in my day and a fraction of data collection. It’s usually pretty low to the ground, rarely over 1.5 meters high, and often on large rocks or rock walls. More like a trunk-ground anole than a trunk-crown. Moreover, though I’ve been looking for it in the vicinity of human habitations, I’ve yet to see it on a building wall. Bottom line: it’s just not that arboreal.
To be honest, the anole that immediately comes to mind is Anolis gingivinus. This species is a bit hard to categorize: it occurs on some Lesser Antillean islands by itself, but on others it is sympatric with a second species (A. pogus). Moreover, on all islands, it tends to be found relatively low to the ground and not surprisingly, morphologically it’s more trunk-ground-like than typical solitary anoles. Of course, I haven’t actually seen gingivinus in nearly 20 years, so my memory may be faulty.
And we shouldn’t forget the Malice of Nature, which leads me expect to open my door tomorrow and see an anole on the ground, which immediately runs up the wall and out of sight.
By the way, there are other cool lizards here. Lots of green iguanas, for example, but also the very cool and herbivorous Cnemidophorus murinus, endemic to Curaçao and nearby Bonaire.
Cnemidophorus murinus. Photo by Jonathan Losos
In September, 2011, Alex Dornburg (Yale), Andy Jones (Yale), Teresa Iglesias (UC Davis), Dan Warren (UT Austin) and I made our yearly pilgrimage to study the marine and herpetological fauna of Curaçao. On the advice of J. Losos, one of our missions this year was to document the dewlap color asymmetry in Anolis lineatus.
In 1967, Stan and Patricia Rand published a paper on the natural history of A. lineatus and noted that:
“The dewlap is large in the male; extended it has a wide border with bright orange skin around a block central spot. The spot is crossed by several widely separated rows of white scales. The border on one side is closely set with yellow or whitish scales, on the other side, the scales are rudimentary and colored like the skin. About half the males have the scales well developed on the right side of the dewlap, about half on the left… one side of the dewlap appears to have a bright orange border, the other side a yellow orange border. The females have a much smaller dewlap, but colored like the males’ and also asymmetrical, though less conspicuously so.”
We braved multiple attacks of push-ups and head bobs and managed to collect and photograph multiple individuals.
Note the large, white scales in the orange field of the dewlaps:
versus the other side of the dewlap which lacks the large, white scales:
The orange vs. yellow-orange difference is a bit subtle and not easily visible in these photos, but it’s there. Like Rand and Rand, we found a roughly equal distribution of individuals with the white scales on the left, and those on the right.
What explains this asymmetry? Are they using the different colors to warn males and attract females?
We are thinking of hypotheses to test during our 2012 trip to the island and we’d appreciate hearing other ideas from other researchers.
Illustrations by A. Seago
Here’s another highlight from the collection of videos that the Glor Lab recorded during an expedition in the summer of 2010 (see our previously posted videos of a fight, color change, and mating). This video is an interaction between a male Anolis distichus and a caterpillar. This interaction left one of the participants with a good meal and the other, well, let’s just say he’s a part of the circle of life.
Male A. oculatus, near Salisbury, Dominica
The recent post on the newly described Anolis tenorioensis, and the variation in both dewlap and body coloration in that group of species, reminded me of the striking variation in body pattern and colour in the Lesser Antillean Anolis oculatus. I was in Dominica in 2010, ostensibly to collect data on hummingbirds and Heliconias, but spent some of my free time watching the island’s only native anole. We were living in the west of the island, near the Caribbean coast and surrounded by dry scrubby forest, and here A. oculatus looked like this:
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