Anole Annals

Anolis sagrei. Photo by Melissa Losos.

Anoles are renowned for their adaptation to different habitats. One particularly well-documented and ubiquitous axis of adaptation involves the length of the hindlimbs. Both among and within species, lizards that use broader surfaces have longer legs. The adaptive explanation for this correlation appears to revolve around a locomotion trade-off: on broad surfaces, longer limbs provide greater sprinting ability, whereas on narrow surfaces, shorter legs provide enhanced nimbleness. Anoles, and particularly A. sagrei, are also known for their ability to adapt rapidly to novel conditions (but see caveat below)—experimental populations introduced to different environments differentiate in hindlimb length in ten years.  For these reasons, anoles may be a particularly good organism to examine the extent to which human-caused habitat alterations lead to evolutionary change or, looked at another way, whether a species can adapt to changing conditions in a human-altered world.

In this vein, Erin Marnocha and colleagues studied populations of A. sagrei on four islands in the Bahamas. On each island, she compared two populations, one in natural, forested habitat, the other in disturbed habitats around houses. These habitats differ both because disturbed areas have fewer trees, but also because disturbed areas have more broad surfaces, such as big trees, walls, and fenceposts, as compared to natural forest, which has lots of narrow diameter vegetation. The prediction is straightforward: A. sagrei in disturbed areas should have relatively longer legs. And that is exactly what they found.

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Owl monkeys in the genus Aotus may be the closest extant relatives of the Greater Antillean primate fauna. Fig. 1 is from Cooke et al.'s recent PNAS paper and summarizes known primate fossils from the Greater Antilles.

Imagine wandering around the Greater Antilles on an anole hunt with monkeys bouncing among the trees above.  As it turns out, your imagination wouldn’t need to take you back more than a few hundred years to make this vision a reality.  The Jamaican monkey (Xenothrix macgregori) – which was described in 1952 by Ernest Williams (a.k.a. the godfather of Anolis biology) and Karl Koopman (a.k.a. the namesake of the Haitian endemic Anolis koopmani) – may have even survived to see the first European explorers.

A recent PNAS article describes the fifth species of extinct monkey endemic to the Greater Antilles (two are from Cuba, two from Hispaniola, and one from Jamaica; see map above for more details).  A precise age for this fossil is unknown, but the available evidence is consistent with the Holocene.  In their description of Toussaint’s island monkey (Insulacebus toussaintiana), Cooke et al. contribute new data to the long-standing debate about the origins and evolutionary implications of the West Indian primate fauna.  Most students of Greater Antillean monkeys agree that they represented a relictual clade of primates that had long since disappeared from northern South America.  Although their precise phylogenetic affinities are still being debated,  the West Indian species seem to be most closely related to either the owl monkeys (Aotus) or the titi monkeys (Callicebus).  Cooke et al. further suggest that the large size of the Greater Antillean primates relative to mainland relatives may have resulted from the island effect.

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