Category: Notes from the Field Page 19 of 22

I’m writing this en route back to Vancouver, after getting my first taste of anole fieldwork in the Bahamas the last few weeks. This summer I’ll be finishing my PhD thesis at UBC on the evolution of food web structure in marine and freshwater fish (see here for my previous research). For my post-doc, I’ll be working with Jonathan Losos at Harvard, asking some related questions using anoles as a study organism.

To get to know the system, I’ve been working with Jonathan, Rob Pringle, and others, helping to set up a terrific experiment around Staniel Cay in the Exumas (see Jonathan’s post for details). It’s been my first foray into anole ecology, and really to terrestrial ecology in any habitat. It was slow going at first, but I learned a few food web sampling techniques, and rapidly improved my ability to spot anoles in the vegetation on small islands. I spent most days helping to spray paint Anolis sagrei to estimate population sizes on the islands.

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Over at Chipojolab, the Chipojo Bobo himself and his merry band of ethologists are providing regular updates on their research on the behavior of brown anoles, and how it is affected by the presence of predatory curly-tailed lizards. Check it out, and follow the exploits of Nolan, the conch-shell inhabiting bull sagrei.

p.s. In Cuba, the locals refer to crown giant anoles, members of the A. equestris group as “chipojos.” False chameleons, Chamaeleolis, are called “chipojo bobos,” meaning, more-or-less, clumsy crown giant anoles.

While out studying everyone’s favorite evolutionary radiation in the Bahamas, one can’t help but come across exemplars of another important evolutionary group, pictured above. Can anyone tell us what that group is, and what its place is in the history of evolutionary biology?

Captain Leal and First Mate Kolbe. Photo by Gilligan.

Over at Chipojolab, Manuel Leal has a video and a photograph from last week’s field work on Abaco, Bahamas. The video is of yours truly, failing to noose a wily brown anole, Anolis sagrei. More interesting is the photo of Leal next to an odd looking piece of equipment. What is that gizmo? Here’s a close-up:

By slowing turning the knob at the lower right, the tweezers are pulled downward, allowing the dewlap to be pulled out to maximal extension.

This Rube Goldberg contraption is used to pull out a male’s dewlap to take color readings with a spectrophotometer.

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            Sitting on an airplane from Boston to Miami, en route to Marsh Harbour, I realized that this trip marks the 20^th anniversary of my Bahamian fieldwork. It was as a callow new postdoc at the University of California, Davis, that I first embarked to the Bahamas in May, 1991, setting forward a research program that has brought me back every year in the past two decades, some times more than once per year. I’ve lost track of how much time in total I’ve spent there, but it’s been more than a year of my life (of course, I should point out that my colleagues in crime have been going there even longer, Dave Spiller since the 80’s and Tom Schoener, since the 70’s).

            What keeps bringing us back? Despite what you might think, it’s not the beaches, or even the casinos! The primary reason is that in many areas of the Bahamas, there are a large number of very small islands. They are officially termed “rocks,” and aptly so: they are craggy dots of limestone sharpness, ranging in size from a few square meters on up. There are several things that are great about these islets. First, they have complex ecosystems, but not too complex: a few species of bushes and trees, a variety of insects and other arthropods, and often only one species of lizard, the brown anole, Anolis sagrei. As the islands get bigger, they become lusher and more species rich in everything, including lizards. Second, many of the islands are just the right size: big enough to have lizards (the smallest islands generally don’t), small enough that we can easily census the populations of lizards, spiders, plants, and other creatures.

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One of the perks of working on anoles is doing fieldwork in exotic and interesting places. For me, being located as I am in steamy New Orleans, an additional perk is that I can (and do!) do fieldwork in my metaphorical back yard. As of last year, I have begun what I hope will become a long-term study of a local population of Anolis carolinensis in Washington Square Park in the Faubourg Marigny, right on the edge of the French Quarter. (As an aside to fellow anole biologists, if anyone is planning future anole collecting trips to NOLA my lab and I would be more than happy to help out, with the caveat that the anoles in Washington Square Park remain uncollected and unmolested, given that selection is one of the many things we are currently measuring). But doing fieldwork in populated urban areas also presents its own unique set of challenges, not the least of which is the colorful local populace. This generally breaks down into several categories. In most cases, people are simply curious as to why someone would spend a warm, spring day diving into bushes for no apparent reason, and immediately assume that you are a lunatic once you explain to them that it is with the aim of documenting the Lizard Invasion (“They’re all around us!”). Others are genuinely fascinated with the anoles, and will listen with interest to what we are doing and why before leaving us to go about our business. Then there is another small segment of the population who hold strong and invariably uninformed opinions on science, lizards, nature and animal rights which they eagerly thrust upon hapless anole investigators with no warning or provocation. Dealing with these people can be difficult, as it requires certain baseline levels of patience and diplomacy that I sometimes do not possess. Finally, New Orleans being New Orleans  also plays host to a surprisingly large amount of people who are not burdened with an abundance of sobriety at 9am on a Tuesday (or, perhaps, ever). Interactions with these special people run the gamut from mildly amusing (the Grateful Dead fan last week who casually mentioned that he was on day 3 of “tripping [his] balls off” and helpfully warned me to “watch out for roofies”) to tiresome (the heroically inebriated gentleman who followed me around the park recently for 10 minutes whilst repeatedly slurring the same unintelligible question in my general direction) and even vaguely unnerving (the cracked-out, half-naked couple chasing a rubbish truck down Frenchmen street and yelling at it).

Pictured: Outreach

It was this inconvenient presence of the public in public places that in 2004 led Duncan Irschick, weary of interacting with other human beings, to make perhaps his most important contribution to anole biology – the “I’m catching lizards” t-shirt. Originally made for Irschick lab members during sampling of the Tulane University A. carolinensis population, these three simple words, printed in stark white on the back of a dark green shirt, were intended to inform the casual passersby as to the nature of our unusual outdoor activities, thereby dissuading them from engaging any of us in conversation. It works extremely well, except on those occasions when it backfires, instead acting as crazy bait and attracting exactly the type of person you don’t want to speak to whilst conducting fieldwork. Still, the benefits outweigh the occasional costs, and my shirt has seen regular use over the years. I don’t particularly recommend wearing it in non-lizard catching contexts, however, as herpetologists are generally considered to be weird enough as it is.