What a horrible way to go! We’ve reported on this before [e.g., 1, 2, 3], but not Folt and Lapinski have published a nice review in Phyllomedusa of wandering and orb weaver spiders eating frogs and lizards in Costa Rica.
From the pages of the San Angelo Standard Times:
Living in the day and age where memes on social media are the prevailing means of communication does have a FEW benefits. I can almost always count on having a good laugh daily at something someone has posted.
Just the other day, I saw a meme that stated, “I was not born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could!” As a naturalist, all I could think about when I saw this posted was one particular species of lizard that has found its way here, and that species is the brown anole.
The brown anole (Anolis sagrei) is one of two species of anoles that currently reside in Texas, but this species is not native to this state. First established near Houston in the 1970’s, this species was known only from areas around Houston, San Antonio and Brownsville as late as the turn of the century.
However, now it can be seen in and among most metro areas within an imaginary triangle that pinnacles in the DFW area, east of I-35 and west of I-45. It has only recently been observed (2016) in the Metroplex, and there have not been enough observations to verify whether there is a breeding population there or not. Even more recently, a smattering of individuals had been reported from a nursery in the city limits of Midland and these observations have been verified.
Originally native to the Bahamas and Cuba, this species has been introduced and is thriving in areas outside of Texas as well. It is arguably the most common lizard observed throughout the southern 2/3 of Florida, and it can also be seen throughout the eastern seaboard of Mexico.
The habitats that this invasive lizard prefers are settings in densely vegetated areas. Although occasional specimens are discovered basking and foraging in short shrubs and trees, the vast majority of sightings are of individuals in terrestrial settings. It is the propensity for living among ornamental plants and shrubs that has enabled this species to thrive in the warmer climates outside of its natural range. Therefore, many Brown Anoles are observed living around landscaped human habitations such as houses and even businesses.
The brown anole is among the most plainly colored and yet most intricately patterned lacertilian species in the United States. Unlike the native green anole (which can vary in coloration from green to tan to brown), this anole is always a shade of brown. The scales on the back are small and granular in appearance and texture, and females are often plainly patterned, adorned only with a light stripe that runs lengthwise down the spine. Males on the other hand are patterned with an intricate array of lightly outlined dark wedges and blotches along the spine.
Both species have varying amounts of dark striping that extends behind the eyes. Males have a brightly colored dewlap that, when extended, is dark red. The limbs are long, and are often colored patterned with dark stripes or bands. The head is not nearly as elongated like the green anole and is not noticeably separated from the body, and the tail, which is colored like the back, is about one-half of the 8-inch total length.
Brown anoles, like other lizard species, are “cold-blooded”, or ectothermic. This means that it does not generate heat from the inside of their body, as mammals and birds do, but rather is dependent on outside sources for heating and cooling. It is active during the early mornings and late afternoons from early April to October, and like many other reptile species it avoids the hottest part of the day by resting in shaded areas. However, the fact that it resides primarily in tropical areas, it is often active throughout the year.
This species of lizard is an opportunistic carnivore, feeding primarily on small insects such as moths, butterflies, crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, and the like.
The brown anole is oviparous, which is a fancy way of saying that it lays eggs. During the breeding season, which typically begins in early spring and extends into late summer, males will attempt to attract females by extending his bright red dewlap (a flap of skin underneath the chin) while bobbing his head up and down in a “push-up” manner.
Following successful copulations, the female will begin to lay clutches of a single egg. By laying an egg about every two weeks, a female can lay as many as 12 eggs in a season. These eggs are laid in areas of high humidity, and typically will hatch in about five weeks. The two-inch long hatchlings are smaller imitations of the female, and are capable of fending for themselves immediately.
This lizard species is a gregarious basker and will often allow people to get rather close as it relies upon its coloration for protection. However, once it feels an intruder has approached too close for comfort, it will quickly dart for cover among the leaf litter.
Michael Price is owner of Wild About Texas, an educational company that specializes in venomous animal safety training, environmental consultations and ecotourism. Contact him at wildabouttexas@gmail.com.
Winning Symposium t-shirt design by Eric-Alain Parker
Calling all anole aficionados! Spots for the Seventh Anole Symposium on March 17-18, 2018 at the Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami, Florida are starting to fill up! We have a limited number of spots for attendees and fewer still for presentations. If you have already registered, great! If you haven’t, please do so soon to guarantee your spots. Registering now does not require you to also pay now – registrants will be contacted in early 2018 to pay the $100 registration fee. Submitting an abstract is not also required at this stage, and can be amended to the registration at a later date.
Female Anolis neblininus .
In November 2017, I had the opportunity to join a team of scientists led by herpetologist Miguel T. Rodrigues (University of São Paulo) in an extraordinary expedition to the Serra da Neblina, a very remote tepui (sandstone table-top mountain) on the Brazil-Venezuela border. The expedition involved the Brazilian Army, several Yanomami guides, and a team of BBC journalists. We collected around 2,500 samples of amphibians, reptiles, birds, small mammals, and plants between 80 and 2,995 m of altitude – among them, at least 10 frog and lizard species new to science!
Neblina peak (2,995 m), Brazil’s highest mountain, as seen from our camp in the Bacia do Gelo (“ice basin”) at 1,997 m.
As soon as we got to an elevation of around 2,000 m, we started looking for Anolis neblininus, the Neblina anole. This mysterious lizard was described based on six individuals collected on the Venezuelan portion of the mountain in the 80’s by a team of AMNH-Smithsonian scientists. To our surprise, it took us only a few hours to find one, two, several individuals – the first records of A. neblininus in Brazil!
The Neblina anole seems to be locally abundant, with more than 30 individuals found over a week. Because of their slow movements and cryptic coloration, these lizards are really hard to spot during the day. All but two individuals were found at night, sleeping on thin branches and leaves on the edge of forest patches, at a height of 1-4 meters above the ground. Although we set up 100 pitfall traps in the area to sample herps and small mammals, all of the anoles were found through active search.
Neblina anoles really like to sleep on fern leaves – most individuals were found this way.
To learn a bit about how much Neblina anoles move during the day, we experimented with spooling a few individuals. Based on how much thread they left along their way, it seems that A. neblininus does not move much in a day. Individuals go up and down short trees and bushes, but do not seem to walk on exposed ground. However, the spools that we had – leftovers from a study of larger Enyalius lizards – may have been too awkward for such small anoles to carry.
Spooling lizards is a simple yet effective way to learn how much they move and what type of substrate they use. Unfortunately, the spools that we had were probably too big for these anoles!
Follow the thread to find the lizard!
These montane lizards experience remarkably low temperatures. At night, when temperatures were as low as 6oC, the anoles were unresponsive for long periods after captured, apparently because they were too cold. On consecutive mornings, we followed individuals (spotted on the night before) to check at what time they would become active. To our surprise, the anoles started moving at different times in each day, between 6 and 9:30 am, in an apparent association with how cold it was. It is therefore possible that the onset of activity is given mostly by temperature, as opposed to when the sun comes out.
Male Anolis neblininus. Too cold to go anywhere.
One interesting feature of A. neblininus is how variable their coloration is. Some individuals have gray bodies, others green or brown; some have yellow heads. They are also capable of changing their colors a bit. The dewlap is well developed in females, with dark spots on an orange or brown background. Male dewlaps are white, bluish, or yellowish. Neblina anoles have a very cool-looking dorsal crest, more developed in males.
Male (left, center) and female dewlaps.
Our recent studies of mainland anole lizard evolution and biogeography have found that A. neblininus is closely related to species from montane Atlantic Forest, Andes, and Andean foothills. This pattern may result from a history of cool habitats connecting South American mountains in the past, followed by habitat retraction and extinction in intervening areas. Our expedition to the Neblina revealed additional species that seem to be related with taxa from distant mountains. We are now examining their history based on genetic data to help shed light on the history of the mysterious tepui fauna.
A Brown Anole (Anolis sagrei) attempts to make a meal of a large centipede.
Anoles eat a wide variety of food items present in their environments, including all sorts of arthropods, and, occasionally, smaller anoles! We might expect that anoles would choose safe, appropriately-sized prey that would reduce chances of injury and guarantee a meal. However, some anoles, including brown anoles (Anolis sagrei), have been seen taking on potential prey that are either quite large (enough that we might foresee trouble actually swallowing the prey item) or poisonous or venomous, such as caterpillars and centipedes.
Another attempt at subduing the centipede.
Margaret Griffis O’Brien, a contributor to iNaturalist, recently observed just such a showdown on the mean streets of Miami between a brown anole and a centipede nearly its own body size. The anole made repeated attempts to take down the centipede before it was scared away from its potential meal by an intervening automobile. The centipede was injured enough from the battle that it was unable to leave the road and later in the day was found flattened by the continued traffic. The centipede, either an eastern bark centipede or the invasive Rhysida longipes, was a member of the family Scolopendridae, a group of centipedes known to possess powerful and painful (to humans, at least!) venoms.
The anole’s predation attempt was characterized by a lot of waiting for opportune moments to attack followed by quick strikes at the centipede.
Given that large, venomous centipedes have been documented in the diet of A. sagrei previously, it would be interesting to know if anoles are able to consume centipedes without being envenomated, how susceptible they are to centipede venom, and whether consuming these large, potentially dangerous prey items is advantageous for these lizards.
All photos by Margaret Griffis O’Brien.
That’s midnite, pacific time, so you can still make it! Go to the Anole Annals calendar site on Zazzle.com, use this code:
CALENDARS365
Night time’s not just for sleeping in the festive anole.
Everyone knows that anoles are diurnal, active by day and snoozing by night. Yet the rascals are opportunistic–light up the night, and they’ll take advantage to extend their carousing and foraging. We’ve had reports on such behavior before [1, 2] in the green and knight anoles (and there are more reports in the literature); now such behavior is reported in the brown anole from Guatemala, in a recent paper by Brown and Arrivillaga published recently in Mesoamerican Herpetology.
A group of Ecuadorian herpetologists led by Omar Torres-Carvajal, in collaboration with Steve Poe, described two species of anoles from the Andes in southern Ecuador. The study was published a few days ago in the Journal of Natural History. One of the new species is unique among known species from Ecuador in that it has a blue dewlap. It was therefore named Anolis hyacinthogularis, from the Latin words hyacinthus (=blue), and gula (=throat).
The second species, a short-limbed lizard commonly found on twigs as far as eight meters above ground, was named after Jonathan Losos. Most people visiting this blog know who this person is, so there is not much I dare mentioning about him, except that Ecuadorian biologists were lucky enough to have him as a guest a couple of years ago, and several Ecuadorian students and scientists have been inspired by his monumental work with anoles. Besides his obvious academic merit, Jonathan has a unique sense of humor and it’s just fun to be around him in the field. Who else refers to an aye-aye as a “sinister cross between Albert Einstein and Yoda”? (Improbable Destinies). Thank you Jonathan for your work!
Journal of Natural History, 2017. doi:10.1080/00222933.2017.1391343
Thank you once again to everyone who participated in this year’s Anole Annals photo contest! As usual, we received tons of great photos, and we’re ready to announce the results. First up, the grand prize winner, is the above photo of Anolis conspersus, taken by Thijs van den Burg. The second place winner is below, Anolis oculatus montanus, by Gregor Weidlich. Congratulations!
The rest of the winners are listed below, and their photos can be seen in the 2018 calendar here! Click the link to order your calendar.
Congrats again to all the winners, and happy holidays!
Winning photos:
Anolis conspersus, Thijs van den Burg
Anolis oculatus montanus, Gregor Weidlich
Anolis luteogularis, Thijs van den Burg
Anolis carolinensis, Nick Herrmann
Anolis huilae, Cristian Castro Morales
Anolis allisoni, Arnaud Badiane
Anolis wattsi. Geoffrey Giller
Anolis allogus, Thijs van den Burg
Anolis porcatus, Jesús Reina Carvajal
Anolis nubilus, Colin Donihue
Anolis grahami, Nathan Wright
Anolis porcatus, Arnaud Badiane
The end of 2017 is nigh, and soon people will be traveling home to spend time with loved ones, eating a superfluous amount of cookies and sweets, and of course, working on that poster or talk for the 2018 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in San Francisco, California. The 2018 SICB meeting in San Francisco held from 3-7 January is going to be one of, if not, the largest SICB meetings ever with nearly 1950 abstracts being submitted! SICB is one of the largest national conferences for biologists, where an incredible diversity of research is presented each year. And of course, SICB meetings are home to several Anolis presentations, with approximately 40 or more talks and posters this year featuring anoles.
Every year at SICB, the Anole Annals tries to cover as many of the anole talks and posters as we can, and this year is no exception! AA relies on conference attendees to blog about all of the awesome anole work being presented, with a strong focus on undergraduate and graduate research. If you’re a student or student researcher attending SICB, blogging for AA is a fantastic way of getting experience in communicating science with a broader audience. In addition, if you are presenting work on anoles at SICB this January and want to help us blog, we’ll return the favor and cover your work for the blog! Anybody can join the AA family- undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. If you’re interested in blogging for AA at SICB this year, please shoot me an email at anthony.gilbert09@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post and we can get you going. We can provide assistance, examples, and answer any questions you may have when it comes to blogging for AA. Here is an example post from a previous SICB meeting. Thanks all!