Anole Annals

Caribbean Herpetology is a new on-line, open-access journal edited by S. Blair Hedges (Pennsylvania State University), Robert Powell (Avila University), Robert Henderson (Milwaukee Public Museum), and Byron Wilson (University of the West Indies).  On the basis of the content published thusfar, it seems devoted primarily to the publication of short notes on new distributional records, natural history observations, and discovery of species of conservation concern.  For this type of work, Caribbean Herpetology seems like a nice alternative to Herpetological Review. [Note: I’m not sure if the journal has a stable URL, the link above takes you to caribherp, from which point you’ll need to click on the journal link to arrive at Caribbean Herpetology. The html code used to generate this page is beyond me, so perhaps someone else can tell us if there is a direct, stable link to the journal?].

With several colleagues, Cuba’s foremost authority on Anolis lizards – Lourdes Rodríguez Schettino – has recently published a paper on the anoles of Soroa that’s well worth checking out.

Soroa, in Pinar del Río, Cuba

Soroa is an unbelievable place.  Although you wouldn’t guess it to be special for any particular reason – it’s a lower mid-elevation inland site in Cuba’s Pinar del Rio province – the place is lousy with anoles.  There are a whopping 11 species there – on a visit you can see representatives of all six Greater Antillean ecomorphs in action, as well as several ‘boutique anoles’ – weirdos like the aquatic Anolis vermiculatus, or the ‘chipojo bobo’ Anolis (Chamaeleolis) barbatus that have no counterparts on other islands.

Soroa is a legendary site among anolefolk, and has been host to seemingly countless studies of anole ecology, doubtless due to the presence of a moderately comfortable resort on the premises. Lourdes Rodríguez Schettino and her students and colleagues regularly studied the natural history of Soroa’s anoles in the 80s and 90s (much of this work is summarized in an excellent 1999 book), and in the mid-90s, she hosted two joint Cuba-United States research expeditions to study anole community ecology there (Losos et al. 2003).

The famous Soroa waterfall (pretty tame in the middle of a 2008 drought)

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Anolis aequatorialis from Ecuador

Caribbean anoles are renowned for the repeated evolution of ecomorphs, the same set of habitat specialists evolving independently on each island in the Greater Antilles.  But what about in mainland Central or South America, where the majority of anole species occur?  Mainland anoles have received relatively little research attention, particularly with regard to questions of ecomorphology (but see Alan Pounds’ fabulous paper from 1988), primarily because mainland species are both less abundant than Caribbean taxa as well as more cryptic, making data collection much more difficult.  Mainland anoles are, as a first approximation, as diverse ecologically and morphologically as Caribbean anoles, and a preliminary study found that most mainland anoles do not fit neatly into any of the Caribbean ecomorph classes.  Now, in a much broader study, Schaad and Poe compared the morphology of 255 species for seven morphological characters: snout-vent length, sexual size dimorphism, femur length, head length, lamella number, snout scale number, and the ratio of tail to snout-vent length.  They found that very few species are, on morphological grounds, similar to Caribbean ecomorphs.  Most of the species that do have similarity are, surprisingly enough, categorized as grass-bush anoles, although ecologically most of these species do not seem to use grass-bush habitats, from what we know of their ecology.  This paper represents a good step forward in our understanding of the evolutionary diversification of mainland anoles, and how it compares to what has occurred in the Caribbean.  The next step will not be so simple, however—getting habitat data for all these species.