Caption: "Flora and fauna abound."
The Travel section of the NYT recently featured Caribbean getaways and, of course, anoles were a criteria for choosing which destinations to feature. This isn’t a tough one, but can anyone identify this agave-loving anole?
In response to recent discussion of dead-playing anoles, AA‘s French connection Ludovic recently brought to our attention a video of an A. coelestinus doing the same, while floating in a sink.
And as an extra treat, Youtube then directed the alert viewer to a bonus track of what appears to be a fuzzy A. stratulus going to town on a slice of watermelon.
Left: Tubs used to house crickets. Right: The set up inside a cricket tub.
To continue our series on lab anole husbandry, let’s talk food! We feed our room full of hungry anoles Acheta crickets ordered from Fluker Farms. We house crickets in 21-gallon plastic tubs (bought from places like Target or Home Depot) that have been modified for ventilation – we cut holes in the lids and glue wire screen on top. We provide egg layer mash for food, water crystals (usually used for plants) on a small deli cup lid for water, and egg crates to give them places to hide.
Anole in amber--but how old?
The fossil record of anoles is disappointingly small. Other than very young (a few thousand years old) fossils found in caves, where owls and other predators may have left them, only four full-fledged fossils are known from the scientific literature. All are lizards preserved in amber, approximately 20 million years old (give or take a few million). Here’s a picture of one here.
But there are a lot more in private hands. The problem, however, is Jurassic Park. Remember how the mad scientists got their dinosaur DNA? They extracted it from mosquitoes entombed in amber. And where did the amber come from? Perhaps you recall the scene of the lawyer (later justifiably devoured by T. rex) getting off a river raft to purchase some amber. Where? The Dominican Republic. And it turns out that those amber mines do exist, only their deposits date to the Miocene, not the Cretaceous. And, more importantly, as well as skeeters and other invertebrates, occasionally an anole-laden piece of amber emerges from these mines.
Photo by Luis Diaz.
By browsing a PDF showing the amphibians and reptiles of Cuba, I found a picture of a beautiful anole:
Anolis equestris potior.
After doing some research, I was able to find very little info about it. It was described in 1975 by Schwartz and Thomas and lives only on Cayo Santa Maria (province Villa Clara)! It would take on the beautiful blue color during stress or “emotion,” just as some other species of anoles take on a dark phase.
The schedule for the 2012 meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology was recently published and anole enthusiasts will not be disappointed. A key word search of “Anolis” yields 26 presentations, 7 posters and 19 talks! Topics range widely including presentations on the ecology, behavior, development, and genomics of anoles.
Ken Miyata photographed these anoles about 30 years ago. All we know is that they are from Colombia. Can anyone help?
Anolis porcatus juvenile stalks a skipper butterfly (Hesperidae) in Bani, Dominican Republic. Photograph by Miguel Landestoy.
Over the past 6 weeks or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time caring for Anolis carolinensis hatchlings as part of my common garden experiment. One of the most striking things that I’ve noticed about these growing lizards is how a hatchling’s hunting behavior changes over time. Description of juvenile hunting behavior and a cool hunting video from a different species after the jump…
The old (portable pesticide pump), and the new (premium watering wand). Note that watering wand is connected via a hose to the DI water supply at the top left.
The thing about keeping captive anoles that most surprises the uninitiated is the fact that they don’t drink out of bowls. Instead, anoles generally lap up water provided in the form of daily sprayings. If you have a few anoles in a terrarium at your house, a handheld pump action sprayer is more than sufficient (think Windex bottle with water in it). When you scale up to hundreds of cages, however, you’re going to need another solution. In this post, I briefly review some our lab’s efforts to improve spraying efficiency.
For an interesting discussion of how the anole genome informs about human genetics, and discussion of a creationist’s claim that the anole genome can’t tell us anything about evolution, check out the latest post in Anolis Tollis.
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