Here’s another highlight from the collection of videos that the Glor Lab recorded during an expedition in the summer of 2010 (see our previously posted videos of a fight, color change, and mating). This video is an interaction between a male Anolis distichus and a caterpillar. This interaction left one of the participants with a good meal and the other, well, let’s just say he’s a part of the circle of life.
Anole Annals is proud to bring you its newly produced 2012 calendar. Featuring photographs of 13 different anole species taken by world-renowned wildlife photographers and biologists, the calendar is the perfect holiday gift. Moreover, today happens to be 1/2 price Calendar Monday, so order immediately!
From Falk et al., 2011.
The Gates Foundation today announced a multi-billion dollar initiative to eradicate malaria from all lizardkind. Through a combination of heightened prophylactic use, development of genetically modified lacertilians, and enhanced mosquitivory, the Foundation hopes to eliminate this scourge, which afflicts millions of saurians throughout the world.
Well, maybe some day. But a recent paper on Anolis malaria set my mind a-wandering. Most people, likely the Gates Foundation included, are unaware that malaria is a disease not just of humans, but of many other species as well, including lizards. When I first learned that lizards got malaria, I thought it was just a curiosity, not of particular importance. However, I’ve come to realize that I was very wrong in a number of respects.
First, malaria in some cases can have substantial physiological effects on lizards (though this has yet to be demonstrated in anoles).
I previously characterized Albert Schwartz as one of the five kings of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy for having described eight new species from the region. Although Schwartz described the fewest species among the five kings, focusing on new species masks Schwartz’s even more important contributions to cataloguing geographic variation within species. Schwartz’s career-spanning interest in biogeography and geographic variation resulted in a prolific history of describing subspecies in anoles and other taxa. Anyone who’s looked at Schwartz and Henderson’s classic book on West Indian reptiles and amphibians is familiar with the irregular blobs that designate subspecies boundaries on the range maps for many of the region’s most geographically widespread species. Many of these blobs were the result of Schwartz’s own efforts. The pinnacle of Schwartz’s work on geographic variation may be his 1968 monograph on geographic variation in Anolis distichus.
Pop quiz: What do Anolis and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum have in common? Answer: A Google problem.
Rick Santorum’s google problem is that the first hits you obtain when you google “Santorum” are related to the author Dan Savage’s efforts to criticize Santorum’s campaign against homosexuality.
What’s Anolis‘s google problem?
Everyone knows the devastating effect that the chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) has had on amphibian populations almost everywhere in the world–in 2009, it was estimated to infect at least 350 amphibian species on 6 continents.
A sad photograph of frogs killed by the chytrid fungus (image from the UC Riverside Center for Invasive Species Research website)
A copy of the toe clipping scheme resides inside the egg log as a quick reference when clipping or ID-ing babies.
In a recent post on marking methods for field studies, Yoel made mention of the technique we use here in the lab: toe clipping. It is true, as Yoel stated, that this is not an ideal method for lizards in field studies due to the difficulty of identifying the numbers from afar and the chance loss of toes in a rough lizard life. However, for the purposes of the lab, toe clipping has proven to be an easy and effective method of identification. After looking into a few schemes used by other researchers, I settled on a pattern that allows for numbers 0-1999 and involves clipping at most two toes on each foot. With such high egg production over the past year in the lab, it is looking like the next round of breeding will require an adjustment to allow for numbers 0-9999, but the original scheme is serving its purpose for the moment.
One of the key features of vertebrates is the backbone, which is formed in development by a clock-like segmentation process called somitogenesis. Most of what we know about the genes that control somitogenesis comes from studies of just 4 vertebrate species–the mouse, the chicken, the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), and the zebrafish. Until now, we haven’t had a good window into the evolution of somitogenesis from the perspective of a non-avian reptile. The green anole (Anolis carolinensis) is now providing this perspective as a 5th model system for molecular developmental studies.
In a recently published paper (Eckalbar et al., Developmental Biology, 2012), we have shown that green anole embryos share molecular features of somitogenesis with the mouse and the chicken, which are also amniotes. Surprisingly, the green anole also retains expression patterns that match those of the non-amniote species, Xenopus and zebrafish, and that have been lost in the mouse and chick. The American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), which together with birds are classified in a group called the Archosauria, are intermediate in somitogenesis features between anoles and chicken. These findings reshape our view of what was happening in the backbone development of the amniote ancestor, the first vertebrate whose eggs were fully adapted for life on land.
For those in the anole research community, RNA-Seq transcriptome data sets (Illumina HiSeq2000; 28 and 38 somite-pair stages) have been released together with this paper. Transcriptome data links can be found at the AnolisGenome portal and also directly from the NIH Gene Expression Omnibus. We aim to get more transcriptome sequence to the Anolis research community in 2012.