This weekend I recently saw an adult male Cuban brown anole (Anolis sagrei) perching higher than I have ever observed – roughly 4m high!
Adult male Cuban brown anole (Anolis sagrei) perching uncharacteristically high
So anole aficionados, what dizzying heights have you observed trunk-ground anoles up to?
*My apologies for the poor quality of the zoomed in sections.
Earlier this year ,while conducting crocodile (C. acutus) research in Jamaica, I observed some interesting behavior with the Jamaican Twig Anole (A. valencienni). The croc research is conducted at dusk and into the night, which leaves ample time to watch the anoles (during the day) that share our campsite. All of the Jamaican anole species are present at our camp in the Hellshire Hills except A. garmani. The camp is located just off the beach in a sea grape and buttonwood dominated coastal forest.
While lying in a hammock, I watched a female A. valencienni descend a branch toward a tree hollow. As she approached the hollow, I noticed several other females near the entrance hole. I know that it is documented that this species is a communal nester, but to see it was a real treat. During a quick survey of the immediate area (about 20 meter radius), I observed this same activity at two other tree cavities simultaneously. Up to five females were perched outside the cavities, while one or two inspected the entrance. At one of the tree cavities, the females were very wary and during several hours of observation, I noticed that the gravid females entered and exited (after deposition) freely.
At two other cavities, there seemed to be a backup. Females would enter or partially enter, then quickly exit the hole. It wasn’t hard to deduce that something else was occupying the cavity. Even more interesting was that the females at these cavities were not wary, actually completely aloof to my presence. I was curious as to what was preventing their access, so I peered and blew air into one of the holes. As I did this, the females at the entrance which were looking at my face only inches away shifted their attention into the hole. I still couldn’t see anything, so I utilized a flashlight and after doing so, saw that a Croaking Gecko (Aristelligar praesignis) was “blocking” entry and appeared to defend the cavity from intruders. Additionally, I noticed the walls of the cavity encrusted with eggs. Considering the size and shape of eggs, all appeared to be freshly laid or previously hatched Anolis eggs.
I cannot explain the female anoles’ behavior and complete disregard of my presence; even allowing me to touch them (see video).
I had several hypotheses about this behavior; one is that perhaps females worked cooperatively to intimidate the cavity occupier (gecko) at entrance… even enlisting the observer as an ally?
After egg depsition
Before egg deposition
Gecko in cavity (blurry); eye and eyestripe can be seen.
Sitana at Manimutharu, Tamil Nadu (photo by Ambika Kamath)
Earlier this year, I lamented not having any cameras when I witnessed the most epic fight in 5 months of Sitana fieldwork. As luck would have it, I saw an equally impressive fight on the last day of my sixth month of Sitana observation, and this time I had a video camera! I was working in Manimutharu, Tamil Nadu, at the Agasthyamalai Community-Based Conservation Centre, home to Sitana with partially-coloured dewlaps.
A map of the Sitana populations I’ve sampled.
This male-male interaction lasted over 11 minutes, and ended only because I disturbed the lizards. Neither male was injured at all when I caught them after the fight. I’ve broken the video into two parts, one short and one long. The video begins when I realised I was watching two lizards–one is on the large rock to the right, and the other just below the rock on the left. Apologies for the shaky camera-work.
In between the two videos is over two minutes of the lizards biting each other ceaselessly. This length of fighting is atypical–actual combat between Sitana males is usually over in seconds, though the displays and staring-competitions can persist for much longer. This second video gives a better feel for the pace of these interactions. The lizards start out near the rocks on the right of the screen.
The Grenadines. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grenadines- Archipelago)
Check out the Grenadines, a polyphyletic chain of approximately 600 islands found at the southern end of the Lesser Antilles. The islands north of the Martinique Channel are governed by St. Vincent. The islands south of the Martinique Channel are governed by Grenada. (Grenada, you’ll recall, was invaded by the US in 1983).
Given Martinique Channel’s apparent role as a political boundary, I wondered if it is also an important biogeographical boundary, much like Wallace’s Line in Indonesia. Wallace’s line, which passes through through the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok and between Borneo and Sulawesi, denotes a clear faunal break between Asian and Oceanic faunas. The biogeographical explanation is that Wallace’s line follows the transition from continental shelf to deep water channel, which serves as a barrier for migration.
Martinique Channel (line added).
A look at the Caribherp distribution of herpetofauna found on the Grenadines suggests that the Martinique Channel is not actually a biogeographic break. The distribution of most herps found on the Grenadines crosses the channel, suggesting that the channel is not a barrier to migration. And, consistent with this, Google Earth suggests that the channel is not very deep.
Oh, almost forgot: the Anolis species on the Grenadines are A. aeneus, A. richardi, and the invasive A. sagrei.
Anolis aeneus. Photo from http://www.kingsnake.com/westindian/anolisaeneus5.JPG.
Anolis richardi. (Photo from http://reptile-database.reptarium.cz)
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.
Following previous threads documenting nectivory in various Anolis (1, 2, 3), here is another account recently observed in south Florida, from Florida International University’s palm botanist Scott Zona in Miami:
This American green anole was methodically going along an inflorescence of one of the palms (Ptychosperma macarthurii) in my back yard licking the nectar droplet from the tip of each pistillode. This palm is an exotic ornamental from New Guinea and northern Australia but is widely cultivated around the world. It is monoecious (male and female flowers on the same inflorescence) but strongly dichogamous (separation in time). The male flowers open first. The lizard was lapping up a droplet of nectar that is excreted by the long, slender pistillode (sterile pistil) in each male flower. I watched him for several minutes (and have lots more photos). The lizard was very methodical about going to every flower, climbing to another branch, and then exhibiting the same feeding behavior. It is unlikely that the lizard would be a pollinator, because of the strong dichogamy; however, female flowers also secrete nectar, so if the same anole were to find another inflorescence in the female phase, it could affect pollination.
American green anole (Anolis carolinensis) feeding on the nectar of a palm inflorescence in south Florida
Nectivory in anoles has been well summarised in a previous post, in which Ambika Kamath noted that they had observed a a female licking palm flowers in south Florida but regrettably never got a picture – well it may have been a year and 3 months, but here’s one!
With the wealth of introduced anoles in south Florida, I wonder if this feeding behaviour has been observed in other species but not yet documented – the ecologically similar A. porcatus and A. chlorocyanus seem likely candidates…
If anyone would like more information on this, or has a keen interest in palms, please feel free to email Scott directly.
There is quite a bit of evidence that anoles like to display from relatively high perches (e.g. references in this paper), a tendency that seems to cross over to their Old World counterparts, the agamids (e.g. Sitana ponticeriana, as outlined here). The hypothesized reason for this choice is that displaying from high perches enables lizards to be maximally visible to conspecifics, ensuring that broadcast displays are heeded by the neighbours. This summer, my field assistant Divyaraj Shah spotted a Calotes versicolor in Kutch, India, displaying from the most exposed perch I’ve ever seen a lizard on. See if you can spot it below:
Spot the displaying Calotes versicolor
Rick Stanley photo #2 of a large Costa Rican anole
Award-winning nature photographer, naturalist, and undergraduate Rick Stanley spied this large anole in Costa Rica. Is it A. microtus? A. insignis? Something else?
Photo #1
Here’s what Rick had to say: “I encountered these impressive lizards on the Pacific Slope of the Cordillera Talamanca, on the border of Chirripo National Park, in the summer (wet season). They were between 1500 and 1600m elevation, in secondary forest habitat. Although sightings were about a month apart, all of the animals observed were in the same general area near the cabins.
Photo #3
Images 2/3 are of the same individual. Image 1 was taken nearby at an earlier date, so it could be the same individual as well. Image 4 is of a different, slightly smaller individual seen along with 2/3 (perhaps the female?). The male(?) displayed his dewlap at me- I think it was an aggressive gesture, because the female was out of sight by then. When I first saw him, he had a large clump of moss in his mouth that he proceeded to devour (chances are there was an insect in there as well).
Photo #4
The lizards were over a foot long including the tail, although I didn’t catch them and measure svl. The first time I sighted 1 it was sunning. Later, it changed color and appeared more like the individual in photos 2 and 3. Didn’t move much, as I found him in the same place the next day, hanging head down on some vines.
There is also some damage to the animal’s dewlap that isn’t part of the pattern.”
After a wonderful trip to Puerto Rico for the recent Thermal Ecology meeting mentioned here on Anole Annals and so heavily attended by anolologists, we had the opportunity to visit some of the natural forests that the country had to offer.
Riparian habitat in the forest by the El Verde Field Station, Puerto Rico
Whilst in El Verde National Park, we were regaled with stories of local Anolis advancing to the ground and using riparian habitat despite what their ecomorph classification might suggest. Given the recent AA interest in aquatic anoles (1,2,3), I thought a short note on this may be appreciated. Apologies for the deceivingly melodramatic title; alas it was literal, not figurative.
An adult male A. evermanni perched on a boulder surrounded by fast flowing water
Anolis evermanni, a trunk-crown ecomorph, has been known to use boulders along one of the streams for the past two decades or so. With great anticipation, whilst marching through the forest spotting copious numbers of Anolis gundlachi, we were en route to our final destination to find out! Upon reaching the stream, which incidentally offered some beautiful tropical scenery accompanying the break in the canopy, we were not disappointed to find A. evermanni dotted all around the waterway!
I assure you there is an anole there – this wasn’t just an excuse for a rest…!
An adult male A. evermanni displaying
Back in 1990, Jonathon Losos postulated that this shift in microhabitat from trees to boulders forced a change in locomotor strategy. Whilst anoles are able to travel continuously in a forest, by travelling down a tree, along the ground and then up another, the structural heterogeneity presented by these riparian boulders meant that jumping needed to be more commonly adopted. He posited that the difference in thermal strategy of A. evermanni and A. gundlachi, a heliotherm and a thermoconformer respectively, would affect their likelihood of using these boulders along the highly sunny stream. Although A. gundlachi were observed present along the shaded edge, they rarely ventured further out. After some thought on site, this prompted a brief hypothesis by a couple of us; when the sun began to disappear, would the larger A. gundlachi displace the A. evermanni on the boulders?
This may take some imagination, but that blur to the right of the central vine – I assure you that’s a boulder-loving A. gundlachi!
After a couple of hours of enjoying the forests of El Verde, we returned to the field station. As we were leaving and the sun was beginning to calm, I spotted our first A. gundlachi out on a stream boulder followed shortly after by a handful of A. stratulus. This would seem to offer a cool behavioural research opportunity for someone that enjoys sitting in the sun by a river watching lizards…(can’t be that bad a gig, can it?).
A. stratulus also getting in on the action
An interesting aspect of human activity and urban development is the ability of species to respond to new opportunities that did not previously exist. We have seen previous posts (1, 2) on Anole Annals highlighting nocturnal activity in anoles, which are recognised as a predominantly diurnal group. Here is another short observation that I and Sean Giery (of previous Knight Anole fame) observed a while ago whilst doing some night herping at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens which will be published as a short natural history note in an upcoming edition of Herp Review:
On 18 April 2013 between 22:03-22:15 h, a single adult Cuban knight anole Anolis equestris was observed at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens, Miami FL (25.677°N, 80.276°W, WGS84). This individual was observed consuming Lepidoptera attracted to an artificial light source positioned above a doorway. Nocturnal lizards (Hemidactylus mabouia) were also present around the light source and could represent another potential prey source for nocturnally foraging A. equestris. This is the first documentation of A. equestris using artificial light sources to allow for nocturnal activity.
Cuban knight anole (Anolis equestris) active and foraging at night with the aid of a wall light above a door
This behavioural plasticity provides not only a fascinating, but also just a really cool new branch of anole research. This could be highlighted particularly well with introduced species which may experience interspecific competition levels along axes which in their native range they may not have been exposed to. Stay tuned!
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
