2019 in Review

Anolis chloris on the cover of Evolution, photo by J. Salazar

As 2019 wraps up, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on some of the major happenings of the year. It was an active year for Anole Annals and for the anole community. In 2019 we saw ~100 papers on anoles published (note: this is probably an underestimate, since this was based on my google scholar search for “Anolis” and “anole”; check out my list here). As you can see from the word cloud at top of the titles of these papers, anolologists are hard at work studying the ecology and evolution of our favorite lizards. Some major themes from the past year:

Thermal Biology

Thermal biology has long been a topic of interest to anolologists, and 2019 was no exception. Several papers dug into the thermal physiology of anoles this year, pushing the field into new directions. Muñoz and Bodensteiner examined how behavior and environment interact to shape thermal physiology of  Dominican anoles. Also working with the Muñoz lab, Salazar et al. compared thermal physiology of mainland versus island anoles to find that island lizards maintain higher body temperatures; their paper was featured on the cover of the journal Evolution. Several groups of researchers set out to understand how elevated temperatures of cities affect anoles. Hall and Warner tested the thermal sensitivity of lizards during development with experiments on Anolis sagrei and Anolis cristatellus, and Battles and Kolbe looked at these same two species in urban Miami, finding that thermal ecology might explain patterns of habitat use in the city.

Performance & Novel Insight into Traits

Likewise, performance has long been a focal theme in anole biology, but 2019 saw researchers investigate traits and their interaction with environments in new ways. Husak and Lailvaux answered the burning question of whether exercise really has any benefits —at least in anoles — and found that lazy lizards are more likely to survive in the wild. Lailvaux and team also looked at inter- and intra-individual variation in bite force, sprint speed, and endurance, finding sex-specific trade-offs between bite-force and sprint speed. Dufour, Donihue, and Losos followed up on their previous hurricane work with a new study showing an increase in clinging performance of anoles on Dominica following Hurricane Maria. Battles, Irschick, and Kolbe took a close look at locomotor performance and limb kinematics of lizards running on tracks that varied in inclination and smoothness, finding that lizards run slower on vertical and smooth tracks and that urban and forest lizards approach moving on these surfaces similarly. Smith et al. analyzed the expression of genes underlying muscle movement to find that gene expression differs between jaw and leg muscles, giving insight into the molecular basis of performance differences. And Ríos-Orjuela et al. made progress on understanding muscle and skeletal structure of limbs and their relation to performance for two species of continental anoles.

2019 was also a year in which researchers took the time to understand some less–well-studied traits. Baeckens et al. took a really close look at scales and described ontogenetic patterns in scales of Anolis cristatellus using a novel approach: gel-based stereo-profilometry. Wegener et al. found that head size of both male and female A. sagrei increase at higher population densities, as do injury rates. Yuan and colleagues sunk their claws in deep to understand the co-evolution of claws and toe pads across 57 species of anoles. Lastly, Prado-Irwin, Revell, and Winchell looked at a poorly understood trait – the tail crest – in A. cristatellus and found that lizards had larger tail crests in hotter and drier regions across the island of Puerto Rico, including in urban habitats.

Prado-Irwin et al. measured tail-crests in urban and forest A. cristatellus

Urbanization

Finally, continuing with the a trend that has been building over the past few years, several researchers published studies on the ecological and evolutionary effects of urbanization on anoles. Some of these I mentioned above, but here’s some additional studies on urban anoles. Avilés-Rodriguez and Kolbe found that A. cristatellus alter their escape responses in cities in part because of habituation but also because of locomotor constraints of using anthropogenic structures. Winchell, Briggs, and Revell analyzed patterns of injuries and asymmetry in urban versus forest populations of A. cristatellus in Puerto Rico. Several researchers took advantage of the abundant and urbanophilic anoles of Florida. Chejanovski and Kolbe evaluated the combined influences of predator abundance, conspecific density, and abiotic environment on body size of urban A. sagrei. Stroud et al. analyzed behavior of A. sagrei in the Miami metropolitan area, finding a two-fold increase in dewlap displays in the more open urban habitats. Thawley and colleagues looked at the interaction between morphology, thermal preference, and parasitism in Miami anoles, with differences in parasitic infection in A. sagrei but not A. cristatellus between urban and rural populations. Lastly, Tiatragul and the Warner lab described variation in nest site locations in urban habitats.

Anolis aquaticus has a bright orange dewlap (photo by Peter Mudde)

Other Significant Events of 2019

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Kristin Winchell

I am an Assistant Professor of Biology at New York University. My first love is herpetology, but my lab works on urban evolutionary ecology in diverse organisms (but primarily anoles!).

Latest posts by Kristin Winchell (see all)

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