Anoles only lay one egg at a time. This penurious habit has been speculated to result from their arboreal lifestyle—because they spend so much time running around on vertical surfaces, they can’t afford to be weighed down by a big clutch of eggs. Reasonable enough, but is there any evidence that carrying eggs has any cost to female anoles? In a recent study in Ethology, Johnson et al. find that in A. carolinensis, as the mass of the egg increased, display behavior and movement rates decreased, suggesting that females are less active as they become more gravid. Whether this is inactivity results because females are more vulnerable to predators or for other reasons is not known.
Professor of Biology and Director of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in Saint Louis. I've spent my entire professional career studying anoles and have discovered that the more I learn about anoles, the more I realize I don't know.
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rglor
Has anybody looked at performance of gravid versus non-gravid female anoles in the lab?
Jonathan Losos
Indeed, someone has: Cox, R.M., and R. Calsbeek. 2010. Severe costs of reproduction persist in Anolis lizards despite the evolution of a single-egg clutch. Evolution 64: 1321-1330.