From bird and moon comics: http://birdandmoon.com/threatdisplays.html
I spotted this on on Facebook thanks to Susan Perkins and Marc Tollis and new that it would be appreciated here at Anole Annals.
Richard Fortey is the author of a string of richly informative and entertaining books on the history of life on earth, including Life: An Unauthorised Biography. A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (1997), Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution (2000), and Earth: An Intimate History (2004). More recently, Fortey turned his focus on the somewhat more recent history of the British Museum of Natural History, where he’s worked at for decades as a paleontologist. In Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum (2010), Fortey provides a personal account of the evolution of one of the greatest natural history museums in the world.
Seems every few months, another journal has the good sense to put an anole on the cover. Most recent: the new journal Ecology and Evolution, which only took 19 issues to get with the program. We’ll be reporting on the article soon, but for now, enjoy the cover, which is another beautiful photograph by Neil Losin. And here’s a montage of all the recent covers…unless I’ve forgotten one.
Anolis carolinensis is increasingly used as a genetic model organism, but we know suprisingly little about the distribution of geographic genetic variation in this species across its native range. At this year’s evolution meetings, Marc Tollis presented his recently published work on phylogeography of Anolis carolinensis. His work provides basic information on geographic genetic diversity within A. carolinensis, and permits tests of hypotheses about the contribution of riverine barriers, sea-level changes, and southern refugia to this diversity. Tollis sampled 190 anoles from 9 states and obtained sequence data from mtDNA and 10 novel nuclear loci (4 introns and 6 anonymous loci). Using phylogenetic analyses and the Bayesian clustering algorithms in Structurama, Tollis identifies four major clades that appear to have diverged from one another around 2 million years ago: North Carolina, Gulf-Atlantic, Suwannee, and Everglades. Although these populations appear to have experienced range expansions, Tollis rejects the southern refugium hypothesis because expansion events predate the inter-glacial, genetic diversity is no greater in the south, and there is no consistent pattern of northern genotypes nested within southern genotypes. Instead, Tollis’s data points to a rapid and recent westward expansion. Tollis’s work also rejects the hypothesis that rivers are important barriers to Anolis carolinensis dispersal, a result that he suggests is not surprising given the group’s well-established overwater dispersal capabilities. Because this phylogeographic work on Anolis carolinensis rejects both the riverine barrier and refugium hypotheses, it appears that the distribution of genetic diversity is somewhat unique and not widely shared with other taxa distributed across the same region. Phylogeographic analyses of A. carolinensis are long overdue and Tollis’s presentation and associated publication are a most welcome contribution to the field.
Tollis M, Ausubel G, Ghimire D, & Boissinot S (2012). Multi-Locus Phylogeographic and Population Genetic Analysis of Anolis carolinensis: Historical Demography of a Genomic Model Species. PloS one, 7 (6) PMID: 22685573
Grand Prize
Last year we had an Anolis photo contest and produced a 2012 anole calendar. Both were wildly successful. Today, Anole Annals is pleased to announce it is combining both. We herewith announce the 2012 Anole Photo Contest. The goal of the contest is to identify 12 winning photos. The grand prize winner will have her/his photo featured on the front cover of the 2013 Anole Annals calendar and will receive an autographed copy of Karen Cusick’s lovely book, Lizards on the Fence. The second place winner will receive a copy of the calendar and have her/his photo featured on the backcover of the calendar.
This year’s calendar. Put your photo on the cover of next year’s version!
The rules: please submit photos as attachments to anoleannals@gmail.com. To ensure that submissions with large attachments arrive, it’s a good idea to send an accompanying e-mail without any attachments that seeks confirmation of the photos receipt. Photos must be at least 150 dpi and print to a size of 11 x 17 inches. If you do not have experience resizing and color-correcting your images, the simplest thing to do is to submit the raw image files produced by your digital camera (or, for the luddites, a high quality digital scan of a printed image). If you elect to alter your own images, don’t forget that its always better to resize than to resample. Images with watermarks or other digital alterations that extend beyond color correction, sharpening and other basic editing will not be accepted. We are not going to deal with formal copyright law and ask only your permission to use your image for the calendar and related content on Anole Annals. We, in turn, agree that your images will never be used without attribution and that we will not profit financially from their use (nobody is going to make any money from the sale of these calendars because they’ll be available directly from the vendor).
Please provide a short description of the photo that includes: (1) the species name, (2) the location where the photo was taken, and (3) any other relevant information. Twelve winning photos will be selected by readers of Anole Annals from a set of 28 finalists chosen by the editors of Anole Annals. The grand prize winning and runner-up photos will be chosen by a panel of anole photography experts. Deadline for submission is September 30, 2012.
Name that anole. Photographs by Thomas E. Lodge
Tom Lodge of Thomas E. Lodge Ecological Advisors photographed this blue-bellied beauty at Fairchild Tropical Garden, Miami-Dade County, FL, at 10:00am this past Sunday. The lizard is approximately 40-45 mm snout-vent length. Anyone want to take a crack at figuring out what it is? Clearly not A. sagrei. Could it be A. cristatellus, which occurs there? If not, what?
Another look
As regular readers of this site will know, anoles are remarkable for the repeated, independent evolution of ecomorphs on the four islands of the Greater Antilles. Each ecomorph is defined by a suite of ecological and morphological traits that appear to be shaped by natural selection.
In a recent paper, Kolbe et al. ask whether those suites of morphological traits are actually suites. In other words: is convergence in form across islands reached by evolving the same sets of characters in a similar manner? Do all trunk-ground ecomorphs, for example, achieve relatively long limbs by growing both the femur and the humerus (i.e. those traits covary together)? Or do some trunk-ground anoles achieve long limbs by only growing the tibia and the radius while others grow the femur and radius etc.?
Covariance ellipses for 8 species for five trait sets. Find the ellipse for Anolis distichus in the first column. It suggests that A. distichus will have a short humerus when it has a short femur and a long humerus when it has a long femur and this covariance is fairly tight (an oblong ellipse). For lamella# and femur length, however, there isn’t a tight relationship (a circular ellipse) and it’s hard to predict lamella# from femur length. Note the similar shape of the covariance ellipses for the three trunk-ground anoles, A. gundlachi, A. sagrei, and A. cybotes. These suggest convergent evolution of trait sets in that ecomorph.
Understanding whether and how different sets of traits vary together can give a good understanding of how natural selection and evolutionary history combine to explain the convergent evolution of Anolis ecomorphs.
The authors ask several questions in this paper.
A few weeks ago, we collected the common grass-bush anole Anolis pulchellus around the El Verde Field Station for an enclosure experiment looking at interspecific interactions. We stored the lizards in baggies in the lab for a day or two, moved them to their enclosures for just under three weeks, and we’ve recently finished recapturing them from the enclosures. After measuring their growth and sampling their diets, we put them back where we found them so they could continue on their way with a great story to tell their friends.
One unlucky anole, however, never made it to its enclosure. When I retrieved its bag to take to the experiment site I found the following tragic scene:
Early specimens and scientific drawings of Anolis proboscis
At the Evolution 2012 meeting, after a scheduling snafu delayed his talk fifteen minutes and prompted panic from an anticipatory audience, Jonathan Losos mused about the natural history and ecology of the Ecuadorian Horned Anole, Anolis proboscis. In case you missed his talk, read all about the rediscovery of A. proboscis.
Following the talk, an audience member reported seeing a horned anole during fieldwork in the Guiana Shield. She attempted to catch it, but it eluded her. From her description, it sounded like A. phyllorhinus, but A. phyllorhinus has only been reported in the Brazilian Amazon. A. proboscis is Ecuadorian and the third known proboscid anole, A. laevis, is from the Peruvian Amazon.
At the very least, this suggests a range extension for A. phyllorhinus. Or, there could be a new species of proboscid anole waiting to be described in the Guiana Shield! Has anyone else seen this anole?
MIGUEL TREFAUT RODRIGUES, VINICIUS XAVIER, GABRIEL SKUK, AND DANTE PAVAN. (2002) NEW SPECIMENS OF ANOLIS PHYLLORHINUS (SQUAMATA, POLYCHROTIDAE): THE FIRST FEMALE OF THE SPECIES AND OF PROBOSCID ANOLES. PAPEIS AVULSOS DE ZOOLOGICA, S. PAULO: 42, 363-380.
JONATHAN B. LOSOS, MELISSA L. WOOLLEY, D. LUKE MAHLER, OMAR TORRES-CARVAJAL, KRISTEN E. CRANDELL, ERIC W. SCHAAD, ANDREA E. NARVAÉZ, & , FERNANDO AYALA-VARELA, AND ANTHONY HERREL (2012). NOTES ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE LITTLE-KNOWN ECUADORIAN HORNED ANOLE, ANOLIS PROBOSCIS Breviora, 531 DOI: 10.3099/531.1
Anolis fraseri. Photo by pbertner.
We recently had a post on the rediscovery of the horned anole of Ecuador, Anolis proboscis, which is found only in the environs of Mindo, Ecuador. Mindo is a lovely spot whose economy is strongly focused on ecotourism, but in a very rustic, old school way, making it a delightful place to visit, even more so because of its anoles. The horned anole, of course, is the star, but there are several others there as well, such as the crown-giant A. fraseri and the incredibly common A. gemmosus, which can be found sleeping in high numbers, yet is hard to find during the day.
A sleeping gem. Photo by Jonathan Losos
The Tropical Herpetology website has a series of pages on the reptiles and amphibians of Mindo, which includes a list of all species as well as specific pages on some of the species, including A. proboscis, A. fraseri, and A. gemmosus. The site also has wonderful photographs. This is not the first post on the Tropical Herpetology website–we covered their pages on the species at Chical, near the Ecuador-Colombia border, last October. It’s a great site.