I recently observed one of my female green anoles swallowing a freshly laid egg, which I suspect came from the other female in the harem. I looked online to see if this behavior is common in green anoles and I was unable to find any information about it. It seems that this exceptional behavior has yet to be reported. I am not sure why my lizard did this.
Considering that my anoles have access to ample resources, including fruit baby food and plenty of gut-loaded crickets and mealworms, I do not believe that her behavior was prompted by a nutritional deficiency. Perhaps it is a novel form of intraspecific maternal competition. Maybe it is unique to mating in captivity. Or maybe this behavior is unique to this particular female — she does eat a lot, and rather indiscriminately. It is also worth mentioning that she is the comparatively larger and more dominant female out of the two.
I am curious to know if anyone else has witnessed this sort of behavior in green anoles, or if they have any ideas about why she did it. Luckily, I was able to catch some of it on video with my cellphone (please excuse the quality and my shaky hands!) just before she swallowed the egg in its entirety.
Hey!
I’m taking a break for two weeks, but instead of leaving you without a post for two weeks in a row, here’s Anolis porcatus which I mentioned I had tweeted about the week before my first post!
Anolis porcatus is the Cuban Green anole. A trunk-crown anole with a dewlap ranging in colour from reddish to pink. Like it’s name says, it’s from Cuba but it has now been introduced to Florida, Brazil and Hispanola. And one was found in the… Canary Islands?? I’m jealous. That sounds like a great vacation.
As you’ve seen from pictures, Anolis carolinensis and A. porcatus look extremely similar (for obvious reasons now haha).
Well that’s because, they’re the same species. As discussed in the Anolis carolinensispost, the American Green anole is not a distinct species.
I’ve mentioned that I’ve been going though the proposed series of anoles called the carolinensis series. They’re all trunk-crown anoles and look very similar, even identical like the American Green and Cuban Green. Some of the members are found in Cuba & that’s where their common ancestor is thought to originate.
The idea was that Anolis porcatus made its way to America a very long time ago and then, due to speciation, along came A. carolinenis. But because the two can interbreed, that means there’s no reproductive isolation, doesn’t it? That’s not all, but you can read about it from Dr. Losos’ post and the paper itself!
I hope you all have a great week!! I’ll see you on September 3rd. Thank you so much for reading!
Undergraduate Yasmeen Khawaja with her poster at SICB 2020 in Austin, TX.
As with every year, Jerry Husak sent another crew of talented undergraduates to present great work at SICB 2020! This year, Yasmeen Khawaja presented a poster on her work on the role of triiodothyronine (T3) on lizard metabolism, with specific interests in its role on mitochondrial function and oxidative phosphorylation.
Yasmeen noted her interest in T3, stating that our understanding of thyroid hormones generally, and T3 specifically, has been a mixed bag of results in nonmammalian systems. To help remedy this, she injected male green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) with either 0.01 mg/g body weight of T3 (n = 20) or saline (n = 19) subcutaneously for 19 consecutive days. Interestingly, there were no apparent effects on change in animal mass nor their standard metabolic or mitochondrial respiration rates between the two treatment groups!
Overall, Yasmeen concluded that T3 may not be the biologically active form of thyroid hormone in ectotherms and plans to conduct tests with T4 in the future. I hope she presents those data at SICB 2021!
If you look at a map of the United States at night, the urban areas are aglow with light pollution. Urban light pollution disrupts biological processes from gene expression to ecosystem composition across multiple taxa, including birds, insects, mammals, and fishes. With ever-increasing urbanization, understanding the effects of artificial light at night (ALAN) on organisms is crucial to future conservation efforts.
Margaret McGrath, an undergraduate in Dr. Christopher Howey’s lab at the University of Scranton, is examining the impact of ALAN on glucocorticoids in green anoles (Anoles carolinensis), which are commonly found in urban environments. Margaret specifically examined the impact of ALAN on the daily rhythmicity of corticosterone (CORT) and CORT responsiveness to an environmental stressor. She exposed green anoles to either a natural light-day cycle of 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark or 24 hours of light. After six weeks of exposure, Margaret performed competitive immunoassays to measure baseline CORT levels at midnight and noon. Additionally, she measured CORT responsiveness after placing the green anoles in a bag for 30 minutes to simulate an environmental stressor.
Anoles not exposed to ALAN displayed an expected CORT daily rhythmicity with higher levels of CORT during the day than at night. Anoles exposed to ALAN lost this CORT rhythmicity and maintained CORT at a level intermediate to the other group. In contrast, ALAN does not appear to impact the anoles’ CORT responsiveness to environmental stressors. Her results suggest that green anoles exposed to ALAN are still able to respond to environmental stressors. However, there could be downstream effects from the loss of CORT rhythmicity because it has been linked to arrhythmic activity in mammalian studies.
In the future, Margaret plans to investigate if the natural CORT rhythmicity can be regained by anoles exposed to ALAN when placed back into a natural light-dark cycle. This future research can aid in determining the longevity of ALAN’s impacts on organisms. You can reach Margaret at margaret.mcgrath@scranton.edu and find more about her research on chowey.net, Dr. Howey’s website.
Citizen science is a collaboration between scientists and the general public to advance scientific research. A major citizen science project is iNaturalist. In iNaturalist, anyone can submit an observation of an organism, which includes the date and location. It provides a database over a large area and a long time that would be extremely costly for scientists alone to collect. However, the data’s suitability for ecological analysis is uncertain.
To shine some light on the robustness of citizen science data, Chris Thawley, a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College, worked in collaboration with Amy Kostka, an undergraduate at the University of Rhode Island. When the project was developed, Chris was a postdoc in Jason Kolbe’s lab at the University of Rhode Island. As Amy was unable to go into the field, iNaturalist provided the perfect opportunity for her to experience the research process. They decided to compare established hypotheses of native green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) and invasive brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) against the iNaturalist data. They first coded the anoles’ sex, habitat use, behavior, and morphology, and then compared their coded data against existing hypotheses.
Overall, they found that the iNaturalist data corresponded with existing hypotheses of green and brown anoles. Male brown anoles displayed more frequently than male green anoles, in accordance with results in this paper. Males had broken tails more frequently than females regardless of species, likely due to the more risky behaviors conducted by male anoles than females anoles. Green anoles perched more frequently on natural substrates and perched more frequently in a vertical orientation than brown anoles, in accordance with findings by Stuart et al. (2014). Additionally, the brown and green anoles’ reproductive time period (as measured by when hatchlings emerged) matched with the literature.
iNaturalist is a fantastic tool for individuals who are unable to conduct fieldwork, but still want the research experience. However, Chris pointed out that iNaturalist has spatial biases towards urban areas and temporal biases towards the present day. Additionally, it is necessary to sort and clean the data and to train individuals to standardize coding. This study demonstrates that iNaturalist is still a powerful tool and can be used to estimate phenological patterns, differences between sexes, and corroborate existing hypotheses. Chris hopes that, in the future, iNaturalist could be used to generate new hypotheses.
Victoria Pagano’s page from the crowd-funding platform Experiment
Green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) are talked about quite frequently here on Anole Annals, with 11 articles being published in 2018 and 2019 combined! As I am sure many of you are aware, green anoles change color from green to brown, and while it is known how, it is not yet known why. Although there have been multiple field studies into what causes green anoles to change color, the data have been inconclusive. This is why an experimental study is necessary to try to determine the cause of the color change.
In this experimental study, there will be two main hypotheses tested:
The first is the well known thermoregulation hypothesis. I will be testing this by establishing separate light and heat sources, and turning them on and off for different scenarios. If anoles change color for thermoregulation, then they would turn brown more frequently when the heat is off and the light is on.
The second hypothesis is the effect of increased stress. Stress will be induced by sliding a red disk towards the anoles multiple times at a high speed. Any color change that occurs within the red disk moving and the following 10 minutes will be documented as stress-induced.
I will not be able to test the advertisement signaling hypothesis due to feasibility. Because funding and space is limited, I do not have the capacity to house male anoles, as each one needs his own setup. Therefore, testing only females is the only feasible option, and by doing so, the advertisement signaling hypothesis will not be able to be tested, as this hypothesis pertains mainly to males.
To raise funding for this project, I am using an all or nothing crowdfunding platform called Experiment. As fellow anole lovers, I hope that you can help support my scientific endeavors by visiting my project page. All forms of support are greatly appreciated, from donations, to telling your friends about the project, or even by just reading my project page and commenting your thoughts! Whatever the contribution, I am very grateful, and am simply excited to be able to share what I am doing with all of you!
If you wish to learn more about this project, you can visit the project page, “What drives the color change in green anoles?”, where I have posted my methodology, protocols, and will be posting continuous updates on the progression of the project. If you become a contributor, you will have exclusive access to more updates, and will be able to learn more about the research.
My project page stops accepting donations on November 1st at 12:00 AM PT, so be sure to make your way over to the page by then to give your support!
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope that you will explore the project page, and help support this cool and unique research!
“I got an idea and I can’t get rid of it. I go to sleep and it comes right back at me. Never had anything give me so much trouble. It’s kind of a big idea. Maybe it’s full of holes.” – Adam Trask in East of Eden.
John Steinbeck (1962): The year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
So, what was Adam Trask’s big idea in John Steinbeck’s magnum opus “East of Eden”? And, more importantly, how does it relate to anoles? The kernel of an idea that would eventually revolutionize the salad industry—and link anoles to a literary legend—can be found in the fictional dialogue written by Steinbeck in 1952.
“… they’ve dug up a mastodon in Siberia. Been in the ice thousands of years. And the meat’s still good.” said Adam Trask.
“Mastodon?” inquired Will Hamilton.
“Yes, a kind of elephant that hasn’t lived on the earth for a long time.”
“Meat was still fresh?” asked Will.
“Sweet as a porkchop” proclaimed Adam.
Steinbeck was born in the Salinas Valley of Central California, known as “America’s Salad Bowl” for its prodigious production of leafy greens. He spent many summers, while away from college at Stanford, working in the vegetable fields near Salinas. Steinbeck’s fondness for his birthplace and working knowledge of the agriculture industry is a cornerstone to many of his novels, especially “East of Eden.”
“… in the cold parts of the country, don’t you think people get to wanting perishable things in the winter—like peas and lettuce and cauliflower? In a big parts of the country they don’t have those things for months and months. And right here in the Salinas Valley we can raise them all the year around.” declared Adam.
“Right here isn’t right there,” said Will. “What’s your idea?”
“… if you chop ice fine and lay a head of lettuce in it and wrap it in waxed paper, in will keep three weeks and come out fresh and good.” said Adam.
“Go on,” said Will cautiously.
“Well, you know the railroads … they’re pretty good. Do you know we could ship lettuce right to the east coast in the middle of winter?”
The perennial availability of perishable vegetables in the United States is now commonplace, but in the early 1900s, it made literary characters like Will Hamilton exclaim to Adam Trask to “let your damned idea die.” In fact, America’s most popular lettuce variety (iceberg) was originally called crisphead, until Salinas Valley growers began packing it with crushed ice and shipping it nationwide. The genesis of Adam Trask’s business plan was obviously fictional, but the idea of shipping lettuce with ice was successful and revolutionary in the early 1900’s; however, the method never quite kept vegetables fresh for long enough.
“What arrived in New York was six carloads of horrible slop with a sizable charge just to get rid of it.” – East of Eden by John Steinbeck.
In the pursuit of profitable ways to ensure lettuce does not turn into “horrible slop,” the next advance in production came from the humble bag. Lettuce can last for days on ice, but a bagged salad can last for a couple of weeks. It’s always difficult to establish the original (or best) anything in the food industry (vis-à-vis famous rivalries such as Pat’s versus Geno’s for cheesesteaks or Pepe’s versus Sally’s for pizza), but the late 1980s in the Salinas Valley is believed to be when and where the first bagged salads were packaged, distributed from, and then sold nationwide. The bagged salad turned a commodity crop whose predictability was in the capricious hands of nature into a consumer good as constant on the shelves of stores as shampoo or Twinkies.
Over the next decades, prepackaged leafy green vegetables boomed. To keep up with demand, growers invented creative ways to automate aspects of the production process, such as mechanically harvesting leafy greens. They also ramped-up the speed across the entire supply chain, such that lettuce could be bagged in the field within minutes of harvest and then sent overnight to supermarkets nationwide. These overlapping vignettes of industrial prepackaged salads provide the backdrop for a distinctly modern human-wildlife interaction: Small wild animals found by customers in prepackaged produce.
In our recent paper, we attempted to shed light on this poorly understood phenomenon by surveying online news articles for reported incidents. In doing so, we found that this is a much more common occurrence than one might think and that incidents encompassed representatives of several vertebrate groups. Most incidents involved amphibians (treefrogs and toads), and then reptiles (lizards and snakes), mammals (rodents), and birds. Anoles were the most common lizard that we could identify from the pictures and descriptions provided in the reports. The anole incidents included Green Fruit Loop, the aptly named Green Anole that became a class pet at Riverside Elementary in New Jersey. We suggested that the likely source of Green Anoles among the incidents was Florida because not only is the species is common there, but by 2012 the state was the third largest producer of leafy green vegetables in the United States, behind only California and Arizona.
Figure 1 from Hughes et al. (2019): Taxonomic and temporal breakdown for 40 incidents of extemporaneous wild animals found by customers in prepackaged produce items purchased in the United States. A) Vertebrate diversity among incidents; B) Annual distribution of incidents; and C) Monthly distribution of incidents.
An interesting social element emerged from my deep-dive into the trenches of the internet. I found that these incidents were shrouded in uncertainty and thus reporters often relied on anecdotes to discuss and describe them. One common urban myth was that these incidents almost never happen and the second was that if they happen, then it was because the produce was organic. In contrast to these popular views, we found that at least 40 incidents were reported since 2003—so, not exactly rare—and that less than 30% of incidents involved organic produce—most actually came from conventionally grown crops. For greater context and more details, see the Discussion of our paper where we address: 1) why these unfounded views may have persisted; 2) spatial, taxonomic, and seasonal patterns to our findings; 3) our results in the context of competing demands imposed upon the produce industry; and 4) the biosecurity concerns relating to the unintentional translocation of wild amphibians.
Modern agriculture has taken significant steps towards industrialization since the time that John Steinbeck penned Adam Task’s revolutionary idea (see Epilogue). Industrialization of food production will help to address the problems associated with feeding 9 billion people, a figure that is projected for the human population by 2050. Wild vertebrates in prepackaged produce, however, may be one symptom of an overburdened and overstretched produce production system. Any solution to this problem will not likely come from greater controls for wildlife, such as the currently employed “scorched earth” approach, but rather from the decentralization of agriculture. We suggest that the best approach would be to first invest in research aimed at studying a wide segment of biodiversity near agricultural lands, which will help growers assess potential intrusion risks of more species, and second to adopt quality control methods that account for a greater diversity of wildlife to improve screening at more stages in the produce supply chain.
Epilogue:
The birth of Adam Trask’s plan was fictional, but the growth of that idea, as depicted in the novel, is a great example of John Steinbeck’s (often overlooked) scientific mind. While many people my age read “Of Mice and Men” in high school and got to know Steinbeck the literary genius, they may not know Steinbeck the scientist. Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist that became a lifelong friend to Steinbeck when he moved to Monterey in the 1930s. The relationship between the writer and the scientist was one of mutual respect and admiration. At one point, they even undertook a six-week specimen-collecting expedition to the Gulf of California, which resulted in two published books. Not only was Ricketts the basis for Steinbeck’s character “Doc” in several novels (e.g., “Cannery Row”), but the influence he had on Steinbeck is unmistakable in many of his other works, including “East of Eden.” Adam Trask, for example, spawned his idea for preserving lettuce with ice from a scientific expedition that found a frozen mastodon in Siberia, and he read about this finding, refrigeration science, and bacterial growth in articles from “Atlantic Monthly,” “National Geographic,” and “Scientific American.” The mentioning of these specific journal titles in “East of Eden” was by no coincidence as they would have been the same ones that Steinbeck saw, and likely read, in Rickett’s lab, a place that he visited frequently. At the time of Ricketts death in 1948 (which sent Steinbeck into a depression), the two were planning another collecting expedition to British Columbia and another book.
I have an observation of the Green Anole (Anolis carolinensis) from the southern Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee. A population of these anoles lives on a south facing rock outcrop at the top of the plateau. In November 2017, I saw an individual with what appeared to have multiple hair-like features on its head. I first located this population in March 2017. Of the individuals I photographed in March 2017, neither showed evidence of these hair like features. I have been unable to locate any individuals from this population in two trips to the site in 2018.
Any thoughts on what this hair-like feature might be? Has anyone else observed this in Anolis carolinensis or any other anole species?
History is rich with great rivalries; David versus Goliath, Red Sox versus Yankees, Alien versus Predator, but one of the greatest match ups of our time is anole lizards versus gecko lizards. For readers of this blog that are unfamiliar, for which I assume there are few, geckos and anoles are well matched competitors because of their morphological and ecological similarities. Geckos (infraorder Gekkota) are the earliest branch on the squamate tree (sister to all other lizards and snakes) with over 1500 species around the globe, whereas anoles (genus Anolis) appeared roughly 150 million year after the origin of geckos (nested within the Iguania infraorder). The roughly 400 species of anoles can be found primarily in Central and South America. Geckos and anoles both independently evolved very similar hairy adhesive toe pads that help them adhere to and navigate vertical and inverted surfaces. While anoles can likely trace their toe pads to a single origin (and one loss in A. onca), toe pads likely arose and were lost multiple times within Gekkota, although we are still sorting out the exact details (Gamble et al., 2017). Nearly all anoles are arboreal and diurnal, with only a handful of terrestrial or rock dwelling species. Conversely, geckos can be found thriving in arboreal as well as rocky and terrestrial microhabitats day and night.
While anoles tend to get all of the attention from evolutionary ecologists, with decades of amazing research quantifying their habitat use in the Caribbean, geckos are actually older, with more ecological and morphological diversity. As my prior PhD advisor Luke Harmon can surely confirm, I have been interested in knowing how or if insights from Caribbean anole ecomorphology can be applied to geckos. How similar is the evolution and diversification of geckos and anoles? Do geckos partition their habitat along similar dimensions as Caribbean anoles?
In this post, I’d like to share some of my previous work comparing and contrasting gecko and anole diversification and habitat use and then solicit information and opinions from the anole community for an upcoming field trip in which we will be looking at habitat use of sympatric introduced geckos and anoles.
Fig 1. Our reconstruction of gecko (blue) and anole (green) ancestral toe pad performance based on our best fitting weak OU model of trait evolution. Horizontal bars below the X-axis represent the region in which we constrained the origin of toe pads for each clade. Detachment angle (y-axis) represents our measure toe pad performance (the maximum ratio of adhesion and friction a species can generate). The generation of more adhesion for a given amount of friction results in a higher detachment angle. Shaded bands represent our estimated OU optimum value for each clade. Figure modified from Hagey et al. (2017b).
In 2017, we had two great papers come out investigating the diversification of toe pad adhesive performance in geckos and anoles, and the ecomorphology of Queensland geckos. In our diversification paper (Hagey et al., 2017b), we found that while geckos are an older and larger group than anoles, their toe pad performance does not appear to be evolving towards a single evolutionary optimum. Instead, we found that Brownian motion with a trend (or a very weak Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model) best modeled our data, suggesting geckos have been slowly evolving more and more diverse performance capabilities since their origin approximately 200 million years ago (Fig 1). These results assume a single evolutionary origin of Gekkota toe pads, which was supported by our ancestral state reconstructions, but ancestral state reconstructions are far from a perfect way to infer the history of a trait. And so for now, the true history of the gecko toe pad’s origin(s) remains a ‘sticky’ issue. Conversely, adhesive performance in anoles appears to be pinned to a single optima in which anoles quickly reached after their split from their padless sister group (i.e. a strong Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model, Fig 1).
Given these results and the fact that geckos are such a morphologically diverse group, living on multiple continents in many different microhabitats, our results suggest the adhesive performance of geckos may be tracking multiple optima, and when pad-bearing geckos are considered together as a single large group, could produce the general drifting pattern we observed when we assume their ancestor started without little to very poor adhesive capabilities. On the flip side, we can imagine multiple reasons why anoles appear to be limited in their toe pad performance. Perhaps anoles lack the genetic diversity to produce more variable toe pads or they are mechanically or developmentally constrained to a limited area of performance space. Alternatively, since anoles are nearly all arboreal and diurnal in new world tropical environments, it is possible that they are all succeeding in the same adaptive zone and there isn’t the evolutionary pressure or opportunity to evolve more diverse performance capabilities. Closer studies of the adhesive performance capabilities of the few anoles species that have branched out from arboreal microhabitats, such as the rock dwelling aquatic species would be really interesting!
Fig 2. Our gecko and anole residual limb length calculations suggest geckos (grey triangles) generally have shorter limbs then anoles (black circles). Figure modified from Hagey et al. (2017a).
In our second paper from 2017 (Hagey et al., 2017a), we quantified microhabitat use and limb lengths of geckos across Queensland, Australia and compared these patterns to those known from Caribbean anoles. We found some interesting differences and similarities. Our first result arose as we tried to calculate residual limb lengths and realized that geckos, as a group, have shorter limbs than anoles, which resulted in us calculating residual limb lengths for geckos and anoles separately (Fig 2). We then compared microhabitat use and limb length patterns and found that Strophurus geckos may be similar to grass-bush anoles. Both groups have long limbs for their body lengths and use narrow perches close to the ground. We also found other general similarities such as large bodied canopy dwelling crown-giant anoles and large bodied canopy dwelling Pseudothecadactylus geckos. Unfortunately, we didn’t focus on sympatric Australian geckos and so we couldn’t make direct habitat partitioning comparisons to anoles. We hope to fix that in our next project and would really love to hear from you, the anole community.
Later this spring, I am planning a fieldtrip with John Phillips and Eben Gering, both fellow researchers here at Michigan State University, to Hawai’i (Kaua’i and O’ahu) to investigate habitat partitioning of invasive geckos and anoles, specifically A. carolinensis, A. sagrei, and Phelsuma laticauda. Jonathan Losos one claimed that Phelsuma are honorary anoles! These three species are all diurnal, arboreal, have adhesive toe pads, and are commonly seen in Hawai’i and so we expect them to be competing for perch space. This has been on some of the greatest anole minds since at least 2011 with Jonathan wondering which group would win when the two clades collide in the Pacific. Previous studies of anole ecomorphs across the Greater Antilles and invasive A. sageri in the southeastern US give us a good expectation of how the trunk-crown A. carolinensis and the trunk dwelling A. sagrei should interact and partition their arboreal microhabitat, with A. sagrei pushing A. carolinensis up the trunk. The wild card is P. laticauda. There hasn’t been much microhabitat use work done with Malagasy geckos, and definitely nothing compared to the extensive work with Caribbean anoles. As a result, I don’t know much about exactly what part of the arboreal environment P. laticauda uses in its natural range or how it will fit in with its new pad-bearing brethren in Hawai’i. The best information we have to my knowledge is a study of other arboreal Phelsuma by Luke Harmon in Mauritius (Harmon et al., 2007). He found that while the Phelsuma geckos of Mauritius also partition their arboreal habitat by perch height and somewhat by diameter, they also partition by palm-like or non-palm-like perches. I’m not aware of any anole observations suggesting a palm/non-palm axis of partitioning and so this may be a novel axis that P. laticauda is using in Hawai’i to live in amongst the anoles.
Anoles, geckos, and Hawai’i have come up repeatedly here on Anole Annals
and so we know folks have been thinking about these species and specifically this invasive set of species for a while. We are especially excited to see Amber Wright’s research suggesting P. laticauda was perching above A. carolinensis in her enclosures. We want to know what the anole community has to say. We also don’t want to duplicate or intrude on any projects that are already under way.. If this is something you’ve already started, or started to wonder about… let us know! We would love to collaborate, partitioning interesting questions, if there are already labs working in this arena. We would also be grateful for suggestions, field site recommendations, or relevant publications we may have missed.
At JMIH 2016, I chatted with Johanna Wegener, a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island in Jason Kolbe’s lab, about her poster detailing her work identifying hybridization between Anolis carolinensis and A. porcatus in southern Florida.
Interspecific hybridization in anoles is thought to be fairly rare, with the best-known example being hybridization between Anolis carolinensis (native to the southeastern U.S.) and A. porcatus (native to Cuba) in southern Florida. I was surprised to learn how little we know about this rumored hybrid zone.
A. porcatus was likely introduced into Florida within the last few decades, but the striking morphological similarities between A. carolinesis and A. porcatus make anecdotal reports of hybridization hard to confirm. Wegener conducted the first genetic analyses of hybridization between A. carolinesis and A. porcatus. She genotyped 18 nuclear microsatellites from green anoles in Florida (Palm Beach and South Miami) and western Cuba and conducted a STRUCTURE analysis and found support for three genetic clusters consisting of Cuban A. porcatus, and two Floridian groups (one from Palm Beach and one from South Miami). With the addition of the mitochondrial ND2 marker, she found that the South Miami population had both A. carolinensis and A. porcatus haplotypes. Interestingly, there appeared to be very few recent hybrids; instead, the hybrid group appeared distinct from either parent group, suggesting that hybridization has been occurring for several generations.
In addition, Wegener looked at the variation in A. porcatus and A. carolinensis markers in each hybrid individual and found examples of some parent markers being retained at high proportions in the hybrids, possibly suggesting the retention of beneficial parent alleles in the hybrids.
Given that this study was only conducted at two sites in Florida, the exciting next step of this study is to better quantify the genetic makeup of hybrids across southern Florida and map out the hybrid zone.
