Anole Annals

Anolis grahami in the Hellshire Hills

Today, the genus Anolis represents the most common of Jamaica’s reptiles. Indeed, most Jamaican anoles are quite ubiquitous throughout the island, but the abundance of these and other small lizards  is misleading. Many of Jamaica’s reptiles, several of which are endemic to the island, are in immediate danger of extinction. Indeed the Jamaican herpetofauna is one of the most threatened in the entire Caribbean and several species have already been lost; Many more are now under threat under threat due to  development in Jamaica’s  protected habitats.

Map showing the major protected areas and  reserves of Jamaica
source: http://inweh.unu.edu/jamaica-mpa/

Over the years  numerous protected areas have been established across Jamaica  with the intent of preserving its endemic biodiversity, particularly birds, mammals and reptiles. Two of these areas, the Black River Morass and Portland Bight Protected Area,  are significant refuges for a large number of Jamaica’s threatened endemic reptiles.

Juvenile American crocodile.Crocodylus acutus. A large population of this threatened species currently inhabits the Black River Morass
Crocodylus acutus. Photo by author

By far the most important nature reserve in Jamaica is the Portland Bight Protected Area (PBPA) created by the Jamaican government in 1999. It is the largest protected area in Jamaica and spans approximately 1,880 square kilometers of wetlands, coastal mangroves and coastal dry forests, all three of which are important threatened ecosystems. Although the first priority in forming the protected area was to protect the coral reefs found within, it also serves to protect vulnerable and endemic species. The PBPA encompasses the Hellshire Hills and Portland ridge in the parishes of St. Catherine  and Clarendon respectively; these are the two largest areas of dry forests remaining on Jamaica and form one of the largest areas of relatively intact tropical limestone forests in entire Caribbean.

The coastal dry forests of the Hellshire Hills, part of the Portland Bight Protected Area.
Source: Joe Burgess’s Flickr page

The PBPA  is a reserve for several threatened species of plants and animals and serves as the last refuge for several of Jamaica’s rarest reptiles including the Jamaican iguana, Cyclura collei, which with a global population of 150 lizards is one of the rarest reptiles in the world. The area is also home to the Jamaican skink,  Mabuya fulgida, and the small recently rediscovered blue-tailed galliwasp, Celestus duquesneyi,  both of which have extremely limited distributions outside of the Hellshire Hills, as well as the endangered Jamaican  boa, Chilabothrus subflavus,  which is patchily distributed throughout the Island. The PBPA also encompasses several offshore cays including Little Goat island and Great Goat Island; The  Jamaican government had plans to eradicate the mongoose as well as the feral goats from the Goat islands after which suitable organisms from the mainland dry forests would be transplanted onto the islands in an effort to preserve the endemic dry forest biodiversity. This plan however seems to have hit a a monumental roadblock.

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Ameiva ameiva Photo from Fagner Delfim’s Flickr page

Here at Anole Annals we like to obsess over our  favorite lizards, anoles of course, but there are a vast array of other reptilian marvels out there,  formidable  Cyclurid iguanas, regally patterned Chilabothrus boas and of course the ever wary ground lizards of the Antilles (and elsewhere), the ameivas. Given the ample opportunity for exploration of these seemingly under appreciated animals  I have taken my best shot at writing a post concerning ameivas,  their morphology, ecology an various other bits and pieces of info I’ve picked up over the years; Enjoy!

The large neotropical genus Ameiva contains roughly thirty-two species largely distributed throughout eastern South America and the Caribbean with a few species  extending into southern Central America. Within this genus are some of the  most ubiquitous lizards of the neotropics, though due to their incredible swiftness and skittish demeanor it is rare that one ever sees one of these charismatic lizards out in the open for any extended period of time and even rarer that the casual observer  may encounter enough of them within a single area to appreciate just how numerous they can be. This rather ambitious  post focuses mainly on the  biogeography of  Ameiva, which in many ways mirrors that of Anolis. Most of the information presented herein comes from a 2012 paper  which , among other things, revises the genus Ameiva, recognizing several monophyletic clades and excluding certain species once thought to belong to the genus. More info on ameivas, as well as some amazing pictures, can be found at Father Alejandro Sanchez’s website.

Four geographically coherent clades or species groups have been identified within Ameiva,  two of which, the ameiva and bifrontata groups, occur in South and Central America as well as in Trinidad and Grenada, while the remaining two, the dorsalis and erythrocephala groups,  are distributed parapatrically throughout the Caribbean. Two additional species, A. parecis and A. concolor remain unassigned to any of these four groups.

The bifrontata group is the smallest of the four clades, consisting of one polytypic  species, A. bifrontata, as well as the closely related A. provitaae.

A. bifrontata
source:http://gallery.surget-groba.ch   

 This group is almost entirely South American in distribution, occurring in Colombia and Venezuela as well as on the island of Aruba. The clade is thought to share common ancestry with the West Indian  Ameiva species and both groups share several defining morphological characteristics the most obvious of which is the presence of mild to intense red coloration on the tip of the snout of most species, a feature shared by no other teiids.

The Caribbean  Ameiva form a monophyletic clade thought to be of South American origin
with the South American  A. bifrontata  species group thought to be sister  this one.

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If you’re anything like me, the first image you conjure in your mind when you hear the word Jamaica is a phylogenetic tree showing a monophyletic radiation of six Anolis species representing four ecomorph classes and one unique.

What, that’s not what you thought of?

Anolis grahami, a beauty!

The anoles of Jamaica: Read all about them!
1) Anolis garmani is a crown-giant, although it’s on the small end, if you ask me.
2) Anolis grahami is a trunk-crown and gram for gram one of the prettiest anoles out there.
3) Anolis lineatopus is a trunk-ground anole with a stunningly large cream colored dewlap.
4) Anolis opalinus is a smallish trunk-crown nicely found in a Blue Mountains coffee grove.
5) Anolis reconditus is a unique anole – very little known about it (but see).
6) Anolis valencienni is a twig anole, large and at high population densities for a twig.
7) (And yes, A. sagrei is there, but it’s invaded from Cuba over historical time.)

And as always, check out Caribherp for a full list of the herps of Jamaica and the Caribbean!

Photo by Janson Jones

Who wouldn’t delight in a passel of festive anoles, frolicking around in mid-December? Janson Jones, a raconteur if there ever was, certainly knows how to live for the moment. Check out his latest saurian musings on Dust Tracks on the Web.

“Dear Blair, of course you are right, but the scale is all wrong. Predictability of course within a constrained design and clade of close relatives as in your example. My contingency is at the much higher level of designs themselves.”

Blair Hedges recently sent me the image on the left with the following explanation:

“I was preparing a lecture for my evolution class and came across this reply from Steve Gould to me many years ago (Oct 1986), on a post-it note!

I can’t find my original letter to him but I recall it well.   As a grad student, I heard him give a lecture about the Cambrian Explosion where he claimed that evolution operated differently –contingency instead of adaptation or predictability– at the higher level of animal designs.  I told him I disagreed because I was seeing too much predictability in the adaptive radiations on Caribbean islands to believe that it was not happening throughout life at all levels.

Translation of his reply:  “Dear Blair, of course you are right, but the scale is all wrong. Predictability of course within a constrained design and clade of close relatives as in your example.  My contingency is at the much higher level of designs themselves.”

Not sure how you feel about it, but I still don’t agree with his explanation!  500 mya the Cambrian explosion was just an adaptive radiation like anoles.”

Interestingly, this story jibes very closely with a story of my own. In 1998, a number of colleagues and I published a paper in Science reporting a phylogenetic analysis of Caribbean anoles demonstrating convergent evolution of the anole ecomorphs. A reporter for Science contacted me and in the ensuing discussion, I suggested that an interesting person to contact to get an opinion of the paper would be Stephen Jay Gould. I was quite disappointed when her piece appeared and had no quote from Gould. When I subsequently talked to her, I was astounded to learn that she had, indeed, talked to Gould and he had given a reply pretty much exactly the same as on the post-it above. And…she had decided no one would be interested in what S.J. Gould had to say about replicated, convergent adaptive radiation, and so she didn’t include the quote in her article.