Over the years, many talks on anole dewlaps have featured an image from Nicholson et al.’s 2007 paper from PLoS One on anole dewlap evolution (I saw this image at least once at JMIH this year). Now that its been almost five years since this image was published, I think its time we came up with a new collage of anole dewlaps. Which dewlaps should we include? Who’s got dewlap photos to share for the effort? If you’ve got some nice photos to share for the collage please post them here at Anole Annals and I’ll put them all together to generate our anole community dewlap collage! See the guidelines for posting for instructions on how to post images as part of a comment. (For my part, I’ve accumulated lots of photos from the Greater Antilles, but have almost nothing from the mainland or the Lesser Antilles.)
Who knows what Phenacosaurus dreams about?
On her very first day of anole fieldwork, soon-to-be graduate student Katie B. experienced a clear example of the wisdom of Ernest Williams. Out at night looking for anoles with her soon-to-be advisor, they came across the first Phenacosaurus orcesi of the trip, clinging to a narrow, vertical twig about eight feet above the ground. This led to a long pontification by the advisor on how some anoles sleep on leaves, others on branches, and so on, but how P. orcesi, in so many respects similar to twig anoles, would surely only be found sleeping on the twigs to which it is so well adapted, and would abjure all vegetated slumber sites. Needless to say, the next phenacosaur found that evening was snoozing sprawled across a leaf (as well as the next one found the following evening), teaching Katie both about the Principle of Unsympathetic Magic and the general lack of veracity of anything her advisor-to-be says.
p.s. Katie won the candy bar for correctly predicting the number of lizards captured on the first evening.
I saw the recent posts about orange/red sagrei and I thought I might contribute another observation of orange-colored brown anoles. A few years ago while assisting another grad student with his dissertation work I spotted a few orange-colored brown anoles in a suburban yard in S. Florida. What I thought was most interesting about the observation was that: 1) there were multiple males (2-3) with orange color, and 2) many of the palms on which lizards were perched were a similar orange color. It got me thinking that it could be more than a coincidence.
The orange color on the trees, sidewalks, and other hard substrates in the area is from ground water with a high concentration of iron. When sprayed on the surface with sprinklers it mixes with oxygen and leaves an orange color. Many houses, signs, sidewalks, and even cars in S. Florida are graced with an arc or two of orange residue. I’ve yet to revisit this lawn or surrounding houses, but I bet there are quite a few more houses with orange lizards. For what it’s worth, I see and catch a lot of brown anoles further south in the Miami area and this is the only case of red/orange brown anoles I’ve seen yet. It’s possible that these lizards were covered in rust, but it didn’t look like it when I got one in my hand. It’s also interesting that all of the photos I’ve seen of orange-colored brown anoles are male, however I’ve only seen about 4 cases including this observation. Oh, and the dewlaps on these males were normal(ish), not like the cool one recently posted by Joe Burgess.
Phenacosaurus heterodermus (photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/sngcanary/4207771662/)
“Among the strange and varied production of the high Andes is a small assemblage of grotesque, big-headed, short-legged, prehensile-tailed lizards: the genus Phenacosaurus.”
So starts Skip Lazell’s (1969) taxonomic revision of the three species in the anoline genus Phenacosaurus. Since that time, there have really been only two developments in phenac world. First, phylogenetic studies have conclusively demonstrated that phenacosaurs represent an evolutionary offshoot within the Dactyloa clade of anoles. As a result, most systematists now consider these species to be members of the genus Anolis, though some diehard romantics/heretics still use Phenacosaurus. Second, the last 40 years have seen a veritable phenaco-population explosion, with 11 species now recognized, and word on the street that more are on the way.
Despite these advances, our knowledge of phenacosaur biology has barely budged since Lazell’s time.
Table from Portik et al.'s Conservation Genetics paper reporting new primer pairs for amplification of nuclear loci (left side) and a phylogeny generated using some of these loci from Stanley et al.s' 2011 MPE paper on cordylids (right panel).
A new study by Portik et al. used the anole genome to develop more than 100 new primer pairs for the amplification of nuclear-encoded DNA from squamates, some of which have already proven useful for inferring relationships within and among species. Portik et al.’s carefully thought out strategy for marker development – which focused on rapidly evolving protein-coding loci – ensures that their loci will be particularly useful for phylogenetic analyses. First, Portik et al. focused on intronless protein-coding genes, with the goal of limiting length variation and simplifying alignment. Second, recognizing low variability relative to non-coding regions as a potential limitation of protein-coding loci, Portik et al. focused exclusively on developing markers from loci that are more variable than the first third of RAG-1 (one of the most useful and widely-used of the nuclear genes used previous phylogenetic studies of squamates). This strategy yielded 104 genes and led to development of primers for 170 gene fragments ranging from 407-2,492 bp. Portik et al. conducted limited PCR testing on 70 of these loci and found varying degrees of success across five squamate families, including Scincidae, Varanidae, Agamidae, Cordylidae, and Gekkonidae. More importantly, some of the loci have already proven useful for phylogenetic studies of skinks (Portik et al. 2010 , Portik et al. 2011), cordylids (Stanley et al. 2011) and iguanids (anole genome paper, which is currently in press at Nature).
While high throughput sequencing technology will eventually render PCR primers and Sanger sequencing nothing more than curiosities from a previous generation, this time is at least a few years away. In the meantime, Portik et al. have given the herpetological community some very useful new tools to play with.
Kidd Cay, one of the islands included in the Calsbeek and Cox (2010) study (photo from Losos and Pringle, 2011).
Chances are that if you read this blog, then you also tend to note when Nature publishes something anoley. Thus, you’re probably already aware that last week Losos and Pringle published a reply to a paper by Calsbeek and Cox that appeared in Nature last year. In that paper, C&C concluded that competition is a more important agent of selection than predation for island anoles. In their reply, L&P point out limitations in the original study’s major assumptions, experimental design, and statistical analyses. Rather than go into all the gory details, I suggest you look at their reply directly. Just don’t let your non-anolologist colleagues or family members get a look at their Fig. 1a or you’ll lose any credibility you might have once garnered by speaking about the rigours of field work. As is usual, C&C have also published a reply to the reply where they respond to the criticisms, re-performing some analyses. Again, I don’t want to focus on the details; I’d rather let each reader decide for themselves.
Personally, I enjoy reading replies and replies to replies and if it gets to a reply to a reply to a reply, well even better! It’s the way science should work – someone publishes something, there is debate, and the scientific community self-corrects if necessary. However, recently an article in Ecosphere entitled “Do rebuttals affect future science?” by Banobi et al. challenged this view.
Those rascals! I’ve heard reports of this before, but never seen a photo. I wonder if it’s always a male green anole, or whether both ways occur. In any case, it would be shocking if such liaisons led to the production of hybrid offspring, given that the two species belong to evolutionary lineages that separated many many millions of years ago.
Another spectacular anole photo from Eladio Fernández, the author of the wonderful book on Hispaniolan biodiversity, Hispaniola: A Photographic Journey Through Island Biodiversity. See some of Eladio’s photos–and others–here. But you need to go to his book for the stunning shots of a solenodon in the wild. Anolis insolitus, incidentally, is a twig anole from Hispaniola. This photo was taken at the Ebano Verde Scientific Reserve.
This letter was just received from Dr. Jennifer Rahn (jlrahn@gmail.com):
Hi Anole friends,
We think we have some strange anole behavior on Saba (Dutch Caribbean) this week. No one has seen the indigenous Saba Anole (Anolis sabanus) with this blue belly before. Have any of you heard of it in other species? We think it may be a stray species from a nearby island, unless of course it is some alpha male or other strange but infrequent anolis behavior.
Please let us know if you can explain this to us.
Curious Sabans
Any thoughts? It’s definitely A. sabanus (sometimes called the “panther anole” in the pet trade, and one of my favorite species).
Photograph by Craig Berg
During a spring trip to the Dominican Republic, I spent a few nights at a high-rise hotel along the “beach” in Santo Domingo. The hotel had a concrete imprint, totally devoid of grounds. It faced a busy four-lane road and the “malecón.” A narrow band of greenery, often a single row of trees, separates the far side of the street and the high-tide mark. Anolis distichus and naturalized A. porcatus occur in small numbers along that green band. Some ornamental plantings on the fifth floor, accessible only by scaling the outside of the hotel or through the building or parking garage, supported a small number of A. distichus. I observed at least ten individuals engaged in male-male interactions, mating, and movements across a paved driveway to an even smaller planting with a few shrubs paralleling the drive. Although these individuals (or their ancestors) could have colonized this isolated pocket on their own, I believe that it is much more likely that they were introduced with the plants (a few of which were still in plastic pots). I’m guessing that this scenario is not unique and that similar isolated populations of various species exist in comparable situations throughout the islands (e.g., A. cristatellus occupies analogous, albeit not quite such isolated, plantings at the international airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico). Although some gene flow might occur when new plantings arrive, these tiny isolates, composed of no more than a few dozen individuals, are probably genetically isolated and subject to considerable inbreeding. Has anyone ever examined the lizards in such tightly constrained artificial pockets of habitat? That they exist at all, much less appear to function for extended periods, is testament to the extent to which at least some anoles adapt readily to extremely altered situations.