Anole Annals

Several years ago, Calsbeek and Bonneaud published a provocative paper in which they showed that females preferentially used sperm from large males to produce male offspring and from small males to produce females. An obvious question is: how do they do this? Anoles are known to have sperm storage and to be able to produce fertile young many months after mating, but how can females “choose” which male’s sperm to use to fertilize offspring? Presumably, in some way the female would have to keep track of which sperm came from which male, and what the phenotypic attributes are of those males.

Dartmouth graduate student Katie Duryea reported ongoing work aimed at addressing these questions. Taking a two-pronged approach, she is looking at the genetic basis underlying reproduction in anoles. First, she is examining gene expression in the reproductive tract of female Anolis carolinensis, comparing recently mated and unmated individuals. Preliminary results revealed more than 5000 genes that appear to be upregulated, based on transcript abundance, in the females. Examination of gene ontologies  reveals interesting patterns of what types of genes are upregulated, with apparent similarities to similar work in Drosophila. Second, taking a candidate gene approach focusing on serine proteinase genes, Duryea is comparing differentiation between A. carolinensis and A. sagrei. Preliminary results for one gene show a relatively large number of synonymous changes, suggestive of the action of natural selection.

Clearly, this work is in its early stages, but results so far are tantalizing and provide another example of how the anole genome will prove useful in addressing outstanding questions in anole evolution and behavioral ecology.

**UPDATE (July 17, 2012): Thanks to all the folks who have contributed literature – it’s a huge help! We’ve made good progress towards our first goal of obtaining all original descriptions of Anolis species. Here’s an updated “Most Wanted List.” We’re pretty close to knocking them out….

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Anole bibliophiles and reference collectors,

The Anoline Lizard Specialist Group has a favor to ask, and one to return as well: We need your help assembling a digital reference library for Anolis literature.

Our goal? – To compile PDFs of every published piece of literature relevant to the taxonomy or conservation of Anolis lizards.

The reason we’re doing this is to aid in the IUCN Red List assessment process for anoles. Having ready access to this literature dramatically simplifies the task of conducting and reviewing species assessments. Also, as the IUCN’s “Red List Authority” for Anolis lizards, the ALSG will soon maintain an authoritative list of currently recognized anole species. Ready access to the anole taxonomic literature will facilitate this as well.

We already started this process, and we’ve made a good dent.  Like many of you, we’ve been amassing anole PDFs for years (albeit sometimes haphazardly).  We recently

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This post serves as a lighthearted response to Jonathan’s earlier announcement and as an advertisement – perhaps endorsement – for some of the upcoming anole talks at Evolution 2012.

In his post Jonathan highlights recent comments by David Hembry that describe the blossoming of anoles into “field model organisms,” the ecological parallel of chicks, mice, and Drosophila which have long histories in laboratory studies. While the importance of anoles for Evolutionary Ecology is almost without question, I think that this stops short of describing the present and undeniable future of anole research. From my perspective, the roots of Anolis research are strong and wide, but its flower(s) has not yet fully blossomed.

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Day’s Edge Production in full swing

The guys at Day’s Edge Productions keep on chugging along. Their latest offering is the first video report from their Italian island lizard project, studying the incredible variation of   wall lizards found on tiny Spanish islands. What makes this video worth checking out for anolistas is the incredible abundance and audacity of the lizards, which crawl right over the actors as the camera rolls. Anyone ever seen anoles that daring?

Last year was a banner year for anoles. As Xavier@evolutionistX tweeted at the end of the Norman, OK Evolution meetings: “The star of #evol11: Anolis lizards. They won both Fisher’s and Dobzhansky awards, would like to invite them to a celebrity party @NYC.” And who could blame him? The prestigious Dobzhansky and Fisher Awards both went to workers studying anoles, as did three of the four Young Investigators Prizes. And there were a slew of other excellent anole talks (reported on these pages last year; start at this post and work backwards, or search on “Evolution Meetings”). David Hembry summarized the meeting well on Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: “I confess, I didn’t go to the Evolution meetings for three years. I missed Minnesota in 2008 due to fieldwork, Idaho in 2009 due to illness, and Portland in 2010 due to the EAPSI. When I “returned” in 2011 in Norman, it was like everybody had switched to working on anoles and sticklebacks!” (see the rest of David’s insightful observations on this point below).

But can anoles do it again in this year’s meeting , slated to begin on Friday in Ottawa? You can rely on Anole Annals to be on hand to provide the play-by-play coverage from the spectacle of the opening ceremonies to the climactic closing mixer. And fear not: though not the grand slam of last year, anoles again will bring home some medal.

Here are the talks. Unfortunately, authors are not listed, but you can get all program information at the meeting’s program mobile app website:

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