The Sunday night poster session at JMIH 2011 had a few more anole offerings. Melissa Moody from Iowa State reported on a laboratory experiment on the developmental and fitness consequences of varying Anolis sagrei egg incubation temperature and humidity. Anolis sagrei eggs seem relatively robust to the variation experienced during this experiment. Paul Cupp of Eastern Kentucky University asked whether ground skinks (Scincella lateralis) and green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) could detect chemical deposits from the Eastern Milk Snakes (Lampropeltis triangulum); he found evidence that the skinks could detect these deposits while the anoles could not. Finally, Mingna Zhuang discussed comparative gliding performance of Anolis carolinensis and Anolis sagrei. She found that A. carolinensis is a considerably better glider, perhaps due to the fact that it has a flatter gliding posture than A. sagrei.
In addition to a number of Anole posters yesterday, the Joint Meeting of Icthyologists and Herpetologists featured a talk by Rich Glor entitled “Phylogenetics and Diversification of Anolis Lizards.” In his 12 minutes Rich covered a lot of material. He described: the key components in diagnosing an adaptive radiation (speciation, adaptation and the more controversial extraordinary diversification), how the properties of adaptive radiations result in problems resolving their phylogenies (particularly when diversification rates are extraordinary), leveraging the anole genome project to generate and analyze new, informative loci for anole phylogenetics, the impact of incomplete data matrices on the ability to accurately infer phylogenies, and closed with a presentation of the latest, greatest genus-wide phylogeny of Anoles.
Not an anole, but plays one on TV. Photo from Dust Tracks on the Web (http://dusttracks.com/)
Janson Jones is at it again. Having just driven about as cross-continent as you can get, from Alaska to the Florida Keys, he is now waxing eloquent on the lizards of that delightful island string. Today’s post is about introduced green iguanas, which apparently are everywhere and spreading, but yesterday he posted twice, on brown anoles (A. sagrei) and bark anoles (A. distichus) , with some keen observations on interactions between the two. Most notably, he’s noticed on multiple occasions that the larger browns chase off the the daintier barks.
postscript: Just as I hit the “post” button, Jones put up another of his own, with further observations on bark anoles and outlining what would make an excellent Ph.D. dissertation project. Plus, this intriguing observation:
“…the iPad of anoles in the Florida Keys. They’re right on the edge, living in the third space, transitory ground between the browns on the ground and the greens in the trees. They’re not iPhones, but they’re not desktops either. Right in the middle — and perhaps drawing business from both sides?”
Bark anole, A. distichus, from Dust Tracks on the Web
Today’s JMIH poster session was an anole lover’s paradise! Five posters featured molecular phylogenetic work on anoles, including studies of A. humilis (John Phillips from Central Michigan University), A. limifrons (Jenny Gubler from CMU), the pentaprion group (Julian Davis from the University of New Mexico), the distichus group (Anthony Geneva from the University of Rochester), and the ricordii group (Shea Lambert from the U of R).
Check it out. Read the backstory here.
The recent literature has been full of doom and gloom regarding the prospects for lizard survival in the face of global climate change (e.g., Sinervo et al. 2010). A talk by Alex Gunderson from Manuel Leal’s lab at Duke University provided some important new insights on how our favorite lizards are likely to weather this storm. Gunderson investigated thermal ecology of Anolis cristatellus at nine localities, including four mesic and five xeric locales. His data included thousands of field collected temperature records from live animals and copper models as well as data on preferred body temperature and sprint speed performance across a range of temperatures. Temperature data from live animals and co-distributed copper models showed that the xeric, but not the mesic, populations are behavioral thermoregulators that tend to be found in cooler spots than the randomly placed copper models. Even with the benefit of behavioral thermoregulation, the xeric forest lizards were consistently active at temperatures that exceeded their preferred body temperature. When Gunderson integrated these findings with data on sprint speed performance and climate change, he found that the xeric forest animals are likely to suffer significant reductions in performance associated with climate change. Gunderson ended with a teaser by showing that he has accumulated comparable data on performance across a range of temperatures for all the other Puerto Rican anoles. Next year’s talk should be a blockbuster!
In the last two days, I have received email requests from researchers studying various aspects of anole genomics, one asking for whole genomic DNA from A. carolinensis and the other for material derived from A. carolinensis embryos. These particular researchers are interested in, respectively, promoter elements in opsin genes and cerebral cortex development in the brain, with a particular interest in comparing brain transcriptomes from different species. I have received a number of similar requests in the last few months.
With the sequencing of the A. carolinensis, the first reptile to be sequenced, anoles are now on the radar screen of the comparative genomics community. This is a great thing both for understanding how genomes evolve in general, but also for how anoles evolve specifically. No doubt, this is the dawn of an exciting age in anole biology.
But these requests will no doubt continue to roll in, probably in increasing numbers. And, unlike many “model” organisms, there are not (at least not yet) anole stock centers or other resources to get the material needed for all kinds of studies. Providing genomic DNA is a trivial enterprise, and those of us doing relevant work should probably expect and be prepared for requests like these. But producing embryos for all kinds of developmental/genetic questions is another matter. There will be a need for material from anoles–initially A. carolinensis, but eventually others–at all life stages. We probably can’t expect genomicists to set up their own facilities to produce eggs and offspring (though maybe I don’t give them enough credit). My guess is that in the short term, it will fall on the anole community to provide this material.
Photo by Manuel Leal from chipojolab.blogspot.com
Read all about them here.
CAnolis is a freely downloadable visualization app for learning about Caribbean anole evolution, built using the Processing programming language. Its main purpose is to help teachers of evolution explain convergence and adaptive radiation to high school
and college students. It does so by allowing viewers to click on an island and see where on the phylogeny species in different ecomorphs occur.
Fernando Racimo, creator of the App, explains how it came to be: “The inspiration for the program came after taking a Herpetology class at Harvard, but I didn’t have the means to create it until a friend introduced me to a visually-oriented Java-based programming
language called Processing. I obtained the list of anoles and the clade phylogeny from Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree, while the ecomorph drawings came from a classroom exercise available at the University of California Museum of Paleontology’s website and mentioned earlier in the Anole Annals. My objective was to link island distribution,
phylogenetic placement and ecological adaptation into a single interactive program that made it easy for users to understand how different species of anoles evolved in each island. Jonathan Losos, Mickey Eagleson and Sami Majadla kindly provided advice on how best to display the information.”
The App can be downloaded here:
CAnolis for Mac: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17593686/CAnolis%20for%20Mac.zip
CAnolis for Windows: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17593686/CAnolis%20for%20Windows.zip
Please email fernandoracimo@gmail.com if you have any comments or suggestions for improvements.
From Shufeldt, 1883.
From Danielle Steel’s latest romance novel:
“We have not far to go, indeed, to find our bi-colored masquerader; see the emerald-clad scamp as he eyes you from the brawny limb of the pecan, under which you stand. But what is he up to! You quietly watch him, and his employment seems to be of such a nature that he soon completely ignores you, and proceeds with it at all risks, and at all costs. The mystery is soon solved, and we can readily appreciate this agitation, this bowing and strutting, and all manner of quaint motions, as if the very last drop of his quaint lacertilian blood was on fire—for coyishly, and with all due deference, reclines before his lordship, his chosen mate, exerting all her chameleonic powers to hide her blushes by vain endeavors to match the colored pattern at her command. He can withstand her charms no longer, and for the moment, laying aside all dignity, and the object of his affections not unwillingly submitting, in the next instant finds herself in the passionate embraces of her lord, who, to make sure that he has actually won his coveted prize, winds about her lithe form, perhaps in some mystic love-knot, his entire caudal extremity, and blinds her eyes, first on one side and then on the other, by extension of the flaming ornament at his throat.”
Ok, you can’t actually find this on the bookstand at the local grocery store. Rather, it’s from a paper by a captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, R.W. Shufeldt, published in the American Naturalist in 1883. Romantic interludes notwithstanding, the paper presents a remarkably accurate and detailed report of the natural history of A. carolinensis (in which he referred to the green anole as the American chameleon, Anolis principalis).