Anole Annals

I’ve now read the book in which the Toda et al. paper (see previous post) is published. There are several other chapters that discuss the hypothesis that introduced A. carolinensis are responsible for the decline and even extinction of endemic insects on these islands. For example, one chapter notes that dragonflies have decreased greatly and that green anoles can eat two dragonflies a day. Also, note the green anole eating a cicada on the cover! There is also an article that suggests that green anoles may serve as pollinators.

Anole species have been introduced to many places throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere (for example, Florida and Costa Rica), but relatively little research has examined the ecological impact of these invaders.  Anolis carolinensis has been in the Ogasawara Islands of Japan for several decades, where it attains high population densities and has been blamed for local declines and even extinctions of native insects. It also is thought to negatively affect an endemic skink. Toda et al. report efforts to eliminate the green anole from port areas, so as to prevent them from stowing away and invading additional islands, and to reduce their population densities in other areas. They have found the most effective techniques to be putting out glue-traps designed for cockroaches (pictured here), which reduced anole densities by as much as 50% in some areas, and building Teflon-sided fences that anoles cannot climb.  Efforts are continuing to eradicate these anoles and other invasive species on these islands. This paper also briefly reports a nice demographic study of the lizards, finding that some individuals could live longer than four years.

What's that I hear? Photo by Melissa Losos

We think of anoles as visually oriented animals, but they can hear as well. Very little work has investigated their hearing ability, much less how they respond to aural phenomena. In a recent study, Huang et al. reported that anoles alter their behavior depending on what they hear. In particular, they show that A. cristatellus in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, appear to display less after hearing the call of a predatory bird, a kestrel, compared to their response to a non-threatening granivore, the bananaquit. They also report that simulated ecotourists playing the sound of a camera shutter clicking lead to a decrease in display rate compared to controls or the faux tourists taking flash photos. They interpret this finding as indicating that the sound of SLR cameras clicking, but not their flashes, are interpreted as a threat by the anoles. These results are interesting, but cry out for more thorough study, especially given that data were collected by approaching lizards, watching them for 1-2 minutes, presenting the stimulus, and then recording behavior for another minute and comparing rates of behavior from before and after. Moreover, differences in behavior among treatments were only detected in the final 15 seconds of the post-stimulus observation period, where no differences were detected in the first 45 seconds. Bottom line: it would be very interesting to investigate the role of hearing in anole behavior, and this study provides an inkling that there may be interesting work to be done.

Julián Velasco and colleagues recently added a new species to the anoles: Anolis anoriensis from the central Andes of Colombia, described in The Herpetological Journal. This species is placed in the aequatorialis group, and appears to be very similar to Anolis eulaemus, another Dactyloa group anole from the central Andes. Anolis anoriensis joins a host of recently described Andean anoles from this clade (e.g., Ayala-Varela and Velasco 2010; Ayala-Varela and Torres-Carvahal 2010 – see New Anole Literature for full citations) and adds to the incredible diversity of anoles in Colombia, which already boasts more recognized species than any other country. Despite these recent descriptions, the relationships of Andean anoles remain extremely poorly known, as does our understanding of the factors responsible for the generation of such diversity.

Anolis anoriensis (top panels) versus Anolis eulaemus (bottom panels), from Velasco et al. 2010