Anole Annals

Just found this on Twitter. http://t.co/tHk3ZQBN

People often stop me on the street to ask “how do you come up with so many great topics to post on?” The answer I give is one simple word: “Twitter.” If you want to stay on top of the anole world, there’s no better way than to see what Anole Nation is tweeting. Try it yourself and you’ll see that most new anole papers get mentioned, as well as news of all sorts, and all kinds of great photos and other anolillenea.

And other great stuff, too, like this great curse: “I hope you accidentally swallow an anole and choke on it.” As well as many touching human interest stories, such as this one: “Good Christ! I just went to get the mail from the box and a stupid Knight Anole lizard over a foot long jumped on my arm before bolting.”

How do I do it? I simply search on “anole” and “anolis”. There are some drawbacks, though. For example, it seems a lot of people don’t know how to spell “alone” or–I’m guessing here–“ahole”. So a bunch of the tweets don’t make a lot of sense. And how could I forget? All the tweets about the comic book character Anole, who’s exploits seem to be drawing an ever greater audience (as befits the world’s first gay superhero).

Detour on the information superhighway

And then there’s the bane of my twitter-life: some Japanese tweeters have incorporated “anole” or “anolis” into their twitternames, so periodically there’s a flood of banal tweets in Japanese to scroll through (ok, you got me, I don’t really know that they’re banal because, after all, they’re in Japanese–who knows, maybe they are important insights on anole taxonomy and biogeography). Plus, recently a dude named Ben with his address at “@anole” has started tweeting a ton of irrelevancies.

And, of course, there is some information that you’d rather not know about, like the oft-retweeted link to a disgusting video of a teenager biting a live anole in half and eating it.

It’s a brave new cyberworld out there, but if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of the ever changing anolosphere, Twitter’s the way to go. Unless there’s some new thing that’s better.

The 2013 Anole Annals Anole Calendar has been flying off the shelves, but a few remain, and for those of you savvy shoppers who’ve waited until after Christmas, now’s the time: Zazzle is offering 65% off through Friday. Never too late for a late holiday present! The order page is here; use the Discount code: GIFTSYOUWANT. Get yours before they’re all gone!

In response to many posts Anole Annals few weeks ago on the new classification proposed by Nicholoson and al., today the great website The Reptile Database updated the family Polychrotidae and applied the classification Nicholson with the eight genera.

52 species of Anolis
9 species of Audantia
9 species of Chamaelinorops
35 species of Ctenonotus
83 species of Dactyloa
20 species of Deiroptyx
169 species of Norops (the genus Chamaelinorops is included in the link)
11 species of Xiphosurus

Does this application mean that it has been approved by the scientific community?

The ReptileDatabase, an online listing of all species of reptiles, has just issued its latest update (Dec.24), and in it, has broken Anolis into eight genera following Nicholson et al.’s recent paper. Here’s what they have to say:

“Since the last database release 493 names have been added or have changed, including 62 new species, and 95 other changes such as elevations of subspecies to species status, resurrections, or simply changes in gender. The remaining 336 changes are changed Anolis names.

Anolis revision: The most notable change affected Anolis. We have preliminarily adopted the new Anolis names from Nicholson et al. (2012), even though these changes remain controversial. These authors split Anolis into 8 genera, among which Anolis now holds only 52 species. While this is phylogenetically more informative than a single large genus Anolis, it is unfortunately of limited use, if not confusing, due to unsatisfactory diagnoses of at least some of these new genera.”

Those of you who are long time readers of Anole Annals will remember our lengthy discussion of this proposed change earlier this fall. Readers interested in reliving the discussion might search using the term “Nicholson” to find the many posts on the topic.

The Reptile Database is relied upon by many online resources as the authoritative list of reptile species. As such, this decision will go far to gain widespread acceptance of this taxonomic revision. On the other hand, at least two papers are currently in press criticizing the paper and arguing against this taxonomic split. Stay tuned!