An AA reader writes: “Last night I dreamed about you and the anole annals. You had announced that you were seeking discounts at hotel chains for anole workers and said that you’d arranged a 10% discount for anole workers at Best Westerns.”
Is the truth stranger in fiction? Will the discount really be 20%? We’ll soon be producing the Anole Annals subscriber discount cards. Stay tuned for details.
The website WTF Evolution has been popping up around the ecology and evolution blogosphere lately. It was recently featured by Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is True and by Jeremy Fox at Dynamic Ecology. However, if you don’t read either of these blogs, or haven’t heard about the site, I suggest having a look – it’s pretty funny (especially ‘Fiddler crab’). Best of all, however, is that anoles are featured (and they’re the only organism to get a video)! The example is one featured on Anole Annals previously and is from a study by Casey Gilman in Duncan Irschick’s lab. The video shows that when anoles jump from springy perches, the recoiling perch can hit them in the tail, throwing them off balance. As the captionist at WTF Evolution notes, not a great thing for a lizard that spends a lot of time on branches: “Great work, Evolution“.
Photo by Chuck Horne
I certainly was not expecting to see this so soon! According to the breeder, these anoles were only 3-4 months old when I received them last month (December 4th). Unfortunately, I did not take SVL measurements at first but they have certainly grown in the 1.5 months I’ve had them (the male seemingly more so than the female). I’ve placed a “nest box” in the enclosure with a commercial, tropical blend soil medium and I will check it for suitable “dampness” periodically in the hopes it makes an acceptable laying site. I’d appreciate any advice AA members may have to increase my chances of successfully incubating eggs and raising the babies. I’ll post updates periodically.
Green anole, emerging on the experimental scene. Photo by Justin Walguarnery.
They really are small. Photo by Justin Walguarnery
In their rate of heating and cooling. A recent paper by Walguarnery et al. reveals that baby green and brown anoles change temperatures at a remarkably rapid rate, much higher than that reported for most other vertebrates and comparable to that of insects. The reason would seem to be obvious: they are small, with a large surface-to-volume ratio, and thus they gain and lose heat rapidly. Moreover, the typical lizard posture, with body resting on the substrate, enhances the rate of conductive transfer of heat.
Brown anoles, too. Photo by Justin Walguarnery
The authors point out that this finding has interesting implications for our understanding of habitat partitioning between species. In particular, if the body temperature of juvenile anoles very rapidly equilibrates with the operative environmental temperature of the exact spot they occupy, then individuals can very precisely regulate their body temperature, whereas the slower change of larger lizards makes it more difficult to finely adjust body temperatures by moving from one spot to another.
As part of the study, the authors also measured the preferred body temperature of lizards in laboratory gradients and found that juvenile green anoles preferred to be 2 degrees warmer than brown anoles. This result is particularly interesting because previous work on adult lizards had found that brown anoles prefer warmer temperatures. Assuming that this is a real effect and not an artifact of differences between the methodologies of the two studies, this finding raises interesting questions: why do temperature preferences change ontogenetically, and what implications do these changing preferences have for patterns of habitat partitioning? From my own personal experience, adult brown anoles usually appear to occur more frequently in hot and exposed positions than green anoles, and it hasn’t been obvious to me that the habitat use of juveniles of the species is any different, but I have to admit I haven’t paid that much attention to the little fellas. Like anole biology more generally, the thermal ecology of juvenile anoles is a little explored and potentially important area for future research.
But enough of my blathering. Let’s hear what the author, Justin Walguarnery, has to say about the paper:
“The study was conducted as part of a series of investigations into how two of the most widespread Anolis species interact early in life. In particular, we were interested in identifying patterns of behavior and physiological ecology present immediately after hatching. Our goal here was to observe species characteristics defining the fundamental niche that might be constrained, modified, or obscured later in life.
Jason Kolbe’s latest field site
Wonderful as the International Biogeography Society meeting was, there were more important fish to fry in Miami, so several of us played hooky to go looking for introduced anoles. First stop was Miami Beach, where we headed to the famed Fountainebleau Hotel, site of an introduction of A. trinitatis from St. Vincent (note to Wikipedia-adept readers; the entry for the hotel is quite informative, but lacks information on the hotel’s pivotal role in enhancing Miami anole diversity). Last year, Joe Burgess reported that the colony was no more, but we wanted to check for ourselves.
Slipping into the pool area at the back of the hotel, we inconspicuously mingled with the beautiful crowd, gazing up the enormous palm trees and into the bushes, pretending to be looking for birds and lost croquet balls. The morning was semi-sunny, but very windy—not ideal anole weather, especially when looking for a species hailing from near the equator. Nonetheless, when the sun peeked out, we did find the Miami big three—carolinensis, distichus and sagrei—but no sign of trinitatis. After an hour, with the security team moving in, we decamped through the back and headed on.
Next stop: the lush and beautiful grounds of the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden, its floral magnificence seemingly designed to provide ideal saurian habitat. We first visited the new Wings of the Tropics building, a lovely, enclosed house full of brilliant eye candy in the form of morpho, postman, and other fabulous butterflies. We stopped in there because word on the street is that the building will soon be re-named Toepads of the Tropics because some uninvited guests have taken up residence in the well-vegetated exhibit, enjoying the sun and the abundant insect fare. Sure enough, we spotted both a brown anole and a female red-headed Agama agama.
Floridian red-headed agama. Photo from dust tracks on the web
“Agama”??? you say? That’s right, these lovely African lizards have taken root in a number of places in southern Miami, amongst them the Fairchild. And in a biomically-appropriate way, these East African lizards are most common in the Old World Xeric exhibit in the gardens, hanging out amongst the Malagasy euphorbs and pachypodia, probably imaging that they’ve just slipped across Mozambique Channel. To complete the illusion, they have taken pains to scare away all the anoles from their rocky redoubt, though we did notice one brave male brown anole in the shade of a rock. Agamas may have the same effect on anoles as do curly-tailed lizards, a suggestion made by James Stroud, who was our very capable tour guide to the lizards of Fairchild.
By then, the sun was out in full force and the anole abundance was extraordinary.
I was hoping to get suggestions from the readers of AA about methods of tissue collection for genetic work other than tail tips. I’ve been working with the agamid lizard Sitana ponticeriana, and my work is now taking decidedly genetic directions. It remains unclear whether or not these lizards regenerate their lost tails–while they seem to lose tails easily, I didn’t see any lizards with noticeably regenerated tails in the field. Given this, I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of taking tail tips as tissue for genetic work. Are there other common and easy options for sampling tissue from lizards? Many thanks in advance for your responses!
(Feel free also to weigh in with whether or not you think it acceptable to collect tail tips in a species that certainly autotomizes its tail but does not grow it back–it seems like a grey area to me).
A male Sitana ponticeriana near Pune, India.
AA contributor and anole breeder extraordinaire Veronika Holáňová and colleagues have just described a new species of Chamaeleolis, Anolis sierramaestrae, from–where else?–the Sierra Maestra of eastern Cuba. The species, described in a paper just published in Acta Societatis Zoologicae Bohemicae, differs in a variety of scalation details from the other five species in this group, and the paper includes a very useful pictorial guide to distinguishing among them.
In addition, check out this nifty x-ray.
Who knows how far this fellow’s genes will spread through Asia?
These pages have chronicled the appearance of the brown anole (Anolis sagrei) in farflung places around the globe, including throughout the Caribbean, Hawaii, Costa Rica, and Taiwan, among others. A new paper in Nature in Singapore reports a first: an established population in mainland Asia, in Singapore. The site of the invasion, and apparently for now the only locality for the population, is a new park, Gardens by the Bay. As Wikipedia reports, Gardens by the Bay is “an integral part of a strategy by the Singapore government to transform Singapore from a “Garden City” to a ‘City in a Garden’. The stated aim is to raise the quality of life by enhancing greenery and flora in the city.” Like many invasive anole populations, this one probably was founded by stowaway lizards or eggs transported in potted plants, but this is just conjecture.
As a sidenote, as far as I am aware, this paper is the first to implement the new Nicholson et al. anole classification, explicitly citing the paper as rationale for referring to the species as Norops sagrei.
Hello once again from the IBS in Miami. As I mentioned in my last post, anole presentations are a little thin on the ground here (though not around the conference centre where, with the help from some locals, we saw sagrei, carolinensis, equestris and distichus today).
I did have the opportunity yesterday to check out the the second of two anole presentations here – a new look at the sub-fossil lizard communities, with a focus on a question familiar to many readers of this blog: What’s the deal with A. pogus on Anguilla?
Has A. pogus ever been on Anguilla? Nope.
The study is being led by Melissa Kemp, from Liz Hadly’s lab at Stanford. Melissa has re-analyzed lizard dentaries from excavations on Anguilla that featured heavily in an anole character displacement versus taxon cycle debate in the early 90s.
By analyzing the size distribution of anole dentaries dating back 10,000 years on Anguilla, Melissa argues that not only is there a lack of evidence for a taxon-cycle involving A. pogus, but that there’s no evidence that A. pogus has occurred (in meaningful numbers) on the island at all! To further test this, Melissa has sequenced a portion of cytochrome b for five specimens thus far, all of which have turned out to be A. gingivinus, with more sequences coming down the pipeline.
Anoles aren’t the only lizards Melissa has uncovered – with Thecadactylus, Ameiva and Leiocephalus all present. Anoles have dominated the fauna in all but the earliest (and sparsely sampled) time slice and Leiocephalus was historically present (but probably not abundant) but disappeared several thousand of years ago and has not reappeared in the sub-fossil record since.
This was my first exposure to sub-fossil analysis of lizard communities and I was definitely impressed. I don’t have a sense of how much similar work there is in the literature (but I’m sure readers of the blog can educate me), but there seems substantial scope to collaborate with zoo-archaeologists to get more specimens and data on past trait variation and anole assemblage composition.
If you are lucky enough to live in the tropics then you can do away with incubators, endless tinkering with temperature, humidity and light regimes and let nature do it for you. I have been breeding A. apletophallus in Panama for almost two years and thought I should share with you my take on breeding anoles “in situ.”
Left: Mesh cages hanging in the shade house. Right: Newly emerged hatchling.
I use a very basic shade house that is situated on the edge of the forest. The temperature and humidity are similar to the forest where the lizards live. In the shade house, the lizards are housed individually in mesh cages that I constructed from pop-up laundry hampers and mesh bags. Each cage is outfitted with three branches and a plastic leaf. Females have a shallow soil plate to lay eggs in, which they happily do. I feed adult lizards every three days and at the same time check for eggs. All eggs are removed and placed in a plastic cup with water and cotton wool, which is then placed inside a ziplock bag. Eggs are “incubated” at ambient temperature (~45 days). When the eggs hatch the hatchlings are transferred to plastic boxes with a mesh lid. These “baby boxes” also contain three small branches and a plastic leaf. Hatchlings and subadults are feed every other day. All lizards are sprayed daily with water. Although there is probably room for improvement, this has been a successful and economical strategy to breeding anoles in the tropics. For anyone who wants more details I have posted this on my webpage under “animal husbandry.”
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