Anole Annals

What’s All That Head-Bobbing About?

On April 5, 2011

: Anolis sagrei displaying. Photo by Valerie Simon.

Anoles are renowned for their displays in which they do pushups, bob their heads up and down, and unfurl their colorful dewlaps. Indeed, the internet is awash with videos of such behavior (here’s a good one of A. sagrei including some cool “slo-mo”; here’s a vicious fight with audience commentary; and for the pacifists out there, here’s a solitary brown anole displaying).

But what’s all the displaying about? And, more specifically, is there any significance to how much a particular male displays?

Phobias

By Katharina Wollenberg Valero

On April 4, 2011

In Anole Art, Literature, and Humor, Notes from the Field

Stumbling over the search terms leading to the Anole Annals blog today I found this interesting bit of information:

…”afraid of anolis”?

Scoliodentosaurophobia, apparently, is the scientific expression for “fear of lizards”. It’s a category to the more general Herpetophobia (fear of amphibians and/or reptiles). These sorts of fears might seem a little bit odd to the herpetologist… after all I have heard of colleagues having bite lists for fun (“what was the coolest species that ever had its fangs in you?”). But they are surprisingly present amongst laymen and –women out there. Women in Africa would run screaming when they’d see me handling chameleons – fearing that the chameleon’s stare would prevent them from having babies. In the DR, Miguel Landestoy and I were convinced we could help prevent the slaughtering of Haitiophis snakes out of fear by telling farmers that “the girl (me) is not afraid of them either”, appealing to their machismo. The large Dominican green anole Anolis baleatus (and probably some other large crown giants too) has the nickname Salta cocote because it is supposed to jump at people from the trees, trying to suck their blood (“dice la leyenda que le salta a la gente y le muerde el cocote”). An older gentleman seemed very convinced that the Salta cocote had just sucked to death some of his neighbor’s cattle. It even has its own Merengue song (Caco e maco salta cocote, which literally means “you ugly frog head, lizard”).

Phobophobes, by the way, are afraid of phobias.

Anolis limifrons Down the Hatch

By Jonathan Losos

On April 4, 2011

In Natural History Observations

There’s a nice sequence of an eyelash viper swallowing an Anolis limifrons here (scroll down).

The Anole Genome Is Coming! The Anole Genome Is Coming!

By Jonathan Losos

On April 3, 2011

In Anoles and Anolologists in the News

More than six years in the making, costing untold millions, the fully sequenced genome of A. carolinensis is coming soon to a journal near you. After many promised delivery dates have come and gone, a blockbuster draft manuscript has finally arrived in the hands of its coauthors. Hopefully, things now will move expeditiously and the paper will be published before too much longer, at last bringing the genetic wonders of anoles to the world at large.

Tom Schoener Wins Henry Fitch Award

By Jonathan Losos

On April 2, 2011

In Anoles and Anolologists in the News

Photo from March, 2011 issue of Copeia

From the pages of Copeia: The Henry S. Fitch Award for Excellence in Herpetology is given annually to an individual for long-term excellence in the study of amphibian and or reptile biology. In addition to consideration of the research portfolio, the committee also considers the educational and service impacts of the individual’s career. The award has been given annually since 1998 and like previous winners of the award this year’s Fitch Award winner has a long career that focuses on ecology and evolution and he has directed his attention on lizards. The Fitch Committee was chaired by Maureen Kearney in 2010. Whitfield Gibbons and Jonathan Losos served as committee members and were elected by the ASIH board of governors. This year the committee had to select from among several strong nominations and their deliberations were a challenge. According to the member that nominated this year’s winner, our 2010 awardee is one of the greatest zoologists of our time. His contributions to theoretical ecology and evolutionary biology are immense; he is the author of six Citation Classics. The publication record of the 2010 Fitch winner more than demonstrates long-term excellence for study in the field of herpetology. The curriculum vitae of this year’s Fitch awardee is impressive for its depth and its breadth, and he early on defined the “fundamental questions” most ecologists ask of their organisms. Several ecological themes emerge when one examines his body of peer-reviewed publications: foraging ecology, foraging theory, resource partitioning, niche quantification, spatial ecology, population biology, competition, niche shifts, island ecology, effects of predators on prey, food web dynamics, and effects of hurricanes on island taxa. While the vast majority of scientific papers focus on lizards, our awardee has also published extensively on birds, spiders, and even plants in his attempt to understand the fundamental ecology of organisms. This year’s winner was the first chairperson of the Department of Evolution and Ecology at UC Davis and one of the youngest scientists ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Diamondbacks of the Anole World

By Jonathan Losos

On April 1, 2011

In New Research

Variation in female A. sagrei patterns. Figure from Calsbeek et al. (2010)

Many species of anoles exhibit sexual dimorphism in back patterning, often with the male being relatively uniform and the female festooned with stripes, diamonds, speckles or other geometries (in a few cases, the situation is reversed and the males are the dandies). Surprisingly, there are no reviews documenting the extent of this phenomenon, much less comparative studies explaining its significance (adaptive or otherwise).

Perhaps even more interesting, in some species females exhibit multiple pattern phenotypes within a single population. Most study to date has focused on A. sagrei in the Bahamas. The seminal paper on this topic was Schoener and Schoener’s 1976 study in Evolution, which suggested that pattern variation was related to crypsis, with different patterns being more cryptic in different parts of the structural habitat (e.g., stripes are cryptic on narrow branches). In support of this hypothesis, the Schoeners showed that within a locality, females with different patterns occurred in different parts of the habitat, and among sites, the relative frequency of the types varied in relation to inter-site variation in vegetation.

Principle of Unsympathetic Magic

By Yoel Stuart

On March 30, 2011

In Natural History Observations

The cover of Anolis Newsletter III, supposedly resembling Ernest Williams

“It was while walking along a hedge row in the Dominican Republic, listening to a complaint that I and some of my co-workers did not frame hypotheses every day while in the field, that I invented (or recognized) the PRINCIPLE OF UNSYMPATHETIC MAGIC. This states that, if one arrives at any firm and vivid conviction about matters of fact or theory in the field, the NEXT observation will provide a contradiction.

“The principle is easily confirmed by any field worker. Note, however, that NATURE IS NOT DECEIVED. No opinion merely pretended to, i.e. not held with fierce conviction, will be responded to by a conclusive observation. The MALICE OF NATURE prohibits the PRINCIPLE OF UNSYMPATHETIC MAGIC from being a source of satisfaction to the field worker.”

—Ernest E. Williams in “The Third Anolis Newsletter,” 1977.

The Principle of Unsympathetic Magic, once you’ve learned of it, surfaces everywhere.

25 Species of Anoles at the World’s Largest Reptile Show

By Jonathan Losos

On March 30, 2011

In Anoles in Commerce

The Hamm Reptile Show, operated by Terraristika Hamm, is said to be the largest reptile expo in the world. Several shows are held a year, the most recent 2½ weeks ago. One AA correspondent reports there were “plenty of captive bred anole species. For example: barbatus, porcus, valencienni, noblei, bartschi, roquet, baracoae, allisoni. I think more than 25 species available just on this show.” It’s surprisingly hard to get information on the show on the internet. Can any of our readers tell us more?

New Sightings of Horned Anole

By Jonathan Losos

On March 28, 2011

In New Research

"The rediscovery of a missing anole"

Everyone’s favorite anole, A. proboscis, is featured in an article in the most recent issue of Lacerta. The article is chockful of beautiful pictures, such as the one above, but does have one shortcoming, at least for most of AA’s readers: it’s in Dutch! However, thanks to Harvard undergrad Jelle Zijlstra, we can provide a translation of at least part of the text.

Jelle writes:

Anole Voodoo and Zombies

By Jonathan Losos

On March 25, 2011

In Classics from the Literature

Wade Davis, explorer extraordinaire, made his name as a graduate student at Harvard by proposing not only that Haitian zombies were real, but that they were created by ingesting concoctions that include tetrodotoxin, the toxin in pufferfish and the infamous Japanese delicacy, fugu. When the victim recovers (if he does), he believes he has become a zombie, and this belief is then taken advantage of by the voodoo priest.

Davis first reported his hypothesis, controversial to this day, in a 1983 paper. In that paper, he reports the results of three expeditions to Haiti, in which he documented the preparation of five separate zombie potions in four different villages. The process by which the potion is created is an elaborate and intricate ceremony, which the gentle reader may learn about by reading the aforementioned paper. For our purposes here, the interesting issue is the ingredients that go into the potion.