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Year: 2011 Page 2 of 42
From Falk et al., 2011.
The Gates Foundation today announced a multi-billion dollar initiative to eradicate malaria from all lizardkind. Through a combination of heightened prophylactic use, development of genetically modified lacertilians, and enhanced mosquitivory, the Foundation hopes to eliminate this scourge, which afflicts millions of saurians throughout the world.
Well, maybe some day. But a recent paper on Anolis malaria set my mind a-wandering. Most people, likely the Gates Foundation included, are unaware that malaria is a disease not just of humans, but of many other species as well, including lizards. When I first learned that lizards got malaria, I thought it was just a curiosity, not of particular importance. However, I’ve come to realize that I was very wrong in a number of respects.
First, malaria in some cases can have substantial physiological effects on lizards (though this has yet to be demonstrated in anoles).
I previously characterized Albert Schwartz as one of the five kings of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy for having described eight new species from the region. Although Schwartz described the fewest species among the five kings, focusing on new species masks Schwartz’s even more important contributions to cataloguing geographic variation within species. Schwartz’s career-spanning interest in biogeography and geographic variation resulted in a prolific history of describing subspecies in anoles and other taxa. Anyone who’s looked at Schwartz and Henderson’s classic book on West Indian reptiles and amphibians is familiar with the irregular blobs that designate subspecies boundaries on the range maps for many of the region’s most geographically widespread species. Many of these blobs were the result of Schwartz’s own efforts. The pinnacle of Schwartz’s work on geographic variation may be his 1968 monograph on geographic variation in Anolis distichus.
Pop quiz: What do Anolis and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum have in common? Answer: A Google problem.
Rick Santorum’s google problem is that the first hits you obtain when you google “Santorum” are related to the author Dan Savage’s efforts to criticize Santorum’s campaign against homosexuality.
What’s Anolis‘s google problem?
Everyone knows the devastating effect that the chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) has had on amphibian populations almost everywhere in the world–in 2009, it was estimated to infect at least 350 amphibian species on 6 continents.
A sad photograph of frogs killed by the chytrid fungus (image from the UC Riverside Center for Invasive Species Research website)
A copy of the toe clipping scheme resides inside the egg log as a quick reference when clipping or ID-ing babies.
In a recent post on marking methods for field studies, Yoel made mention of the technique we use here in the lab: toe clipping. It is true, as Yoel stated, that this is not an ideal method for lizards in field studies due to the difficulty of identifying the numbers from afar and the chance loss of toes in a rough lizard life. However, for the purposes of the lab, toe clipping has proven to be an easy and effective method of identification. After looking into a few schemes used by other researchers, I settled on a pattern that allows for numbers 0-1999 and involves clipping at most two toes on each foot. With such high egg production over the past year in the lab, it is looking like the next round of breeding will require an adjustment to allow for numbers 0-9999, but the original scheme is serving its purpose for the moment.
One of the key features of vertebrates is the backbone, which is formed in development by a clock-like segmentation process called somitogenesis. Most of what we know about the genes that control somitogenesis comes from studies of just 4 vertebrate species–the mouse, the chicken, the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), and the zebrafish. Until now, we haven’t had a good window into the evolution of somitogenesis from the perspective of a non-avian reptile. The green anole (Anolis carolinensis) is now providing this perspective as a 5th model system for molecular developmental studies.
In a recently published paper (Eckalbar et al., Developmental Biology, 2012), we have shown that green anole embryos share molecular features of somitogenesis with the mouse and the chicken, which are also amniotes. Surprisingly, the green anole also retains expression patterns that match those of the non-amniote species, Xenopus and zebrafish, and that have been lost in the mouse and chick. The American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), which together with birds are classified in a group called the Archosauria, are intermediate in somitogenesis features between anoles and chicken. These findings reshape our view of what was happening in the backbone development of the amniote ancestor, the first vertebrate whose eggs were fully adapted for life on land.
For those in the anole research community, RNA-Seq transcriptome data sets (Illumina HiSeq2000; 28 and 38 somite-pair stages) have been released together with this paper. Transcriptome data links can be found at the AnolisGenome portal and also directly from the NIH Gene Expression Omnibus. We aim to get more transcriptome sequence to the Anolis research community in 2012.
Anolis species in HerpNet wordcloud, name size is plotted to be proportional to the number of records on HerpNet for that species
Because I’m a big fan of obtaining data from public databases I’m writing another post on availability of anole data from huge bioinformatic databases. This time, I’ll discuss the NSF-funded database of amphibian and reptile museum records known as HerpNet. I found an astonishing 142,225 unique Anolis specimen records on HerpNet, including 602 unique binomials. The over-abundance of names relative to recognized species is due largely to lots of misspellings (I found five different spellings for vermiculatus and four for valencienni). An interesting side note on how errors in electronic databases can propagate themselves: One individual of Anolis sagifer appears in the MCZ (catalog #45484). You can see the original catalog entry here. This entry was mis-transcribed, likely when the database was digitized. That in term led to it’s presence on the MVZ website and HerpNet, and also spawned search pages on GBIF and ITIS.
Many of the five most common species on HerpNet are also among the most common on GenBank; A. sagrei (13040), distichus (8944), carolinensis (8270), cristatellus (7126), cybotes (7106). A. krugi (number 2 in terms of sequences on Genbank) falls to #22 on the HerpNet list. Lots of interesting questions could be addressed using these HerpNet records. For example, we could use these records to thoroughly investigate how new anole names have accumulated and been used over time. Has species discovery/description been leveling off? HerpNet records could also be used to consider how the anole research community’s interests have changed over time and how specific policies have impacted anole collecting? How, for example, has the US embargo of Cuba impacted collection of Cuban specimens?
The more interesting applications of the HerpNet database will come from a careful consideration of the data associated with individual specimen records. A number of efforts, for example, are already underway to use the thousands of georeferenced locality records for anoles included in the HerpNet database to address questions about geographic range and community evolution.