It’s been very dry here in the Bahamas; we’ve barely seen any rain at all. So, when a few drops splattered mid-afternoon, out came the lizards, slurping up every droplet they could find. In the subsequent 30 minutes, I found six Bahamian green anoles (A. smaragdinus), compared to a rate of 1-2/hour for the rest of the day (this rate, in turn, twice as high as in previous days because it was cloudy and cool).
Ever watched an anole drink when it’s thirsty? This video shows what it looks like.
While out studying everyone’s favorite evolutionary radiation in the Bahamas, one can’t help but come across exemplars of another important evolutionary group, pictured above. Can anyone tell us what that group is, and what its place is in the history of evolutionary biology?
Sum, sum, summertime, and Anole Annals readers of all stripes are out there, finding and studying anoles. Why not tell us what you’re seeing and doing? Observations, anecdotes, photographs, descriptions of research projects–the anole world needs to know! Or comment on a new paper, or an old one that made an impression. Or any other aspect of anoliana that comes to mind. Anole Annals welcomes posts on all matters anoline.
In it’s brief existence, AA has already published posts by 21 authors, and many more have commented. Why don’t you join the team? Information on how to post is available here.
p.s. Bonus points to anyone who can name the species above.
p.p.s. Thanks to Melissa Woolley for constructing the image above.
I noted recently that the brown anoles here in Staniel Cay seem exceptionally skittish, and we don’t know why. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but we’ve found a trio of three-footed lizards. What’s going on?
Staniel Cay is one of the quaint Caribbean backwaters, populated by yachtsmen, expats, scalawags, locals and…scientists. For more than 30 years, Tom Schoener, David Spiller and associates have worked here, producing a series of textbook studies on food web ecology (most recently here).
Having finished our work in Marsh Harbour, we have relocated to Staniel, marking a return for me after a 19 year absence. As our plane wended its way down the Exuma
chain, the memories of my previous visits and their results came flooding back. While a graduate student in the 80’s, I read Schoener and Schoener’s 1983 Nature paper reporting the results of introductions of brown anoles (A. sagrei) to very small islands (approx. the size of a baseball diamond) around Staniel Cay. S&S, noting that islands of this size do not normally harbor anoles, decided to introduce lizards to watch the populations wither away, and thus learn something about the process of extinction. But to their surprise, the populations did not go quietly into the night. Instead, they thrived and some downright exploded in numbers, one island going from 10 introduced lizards to 98 the next year.
I will admit here that I used to be a little jealous of other anole catchers. This twinge of want was not necessarily due to any perceived greater intellectual merit of the research, nor to collecting successes in terms of sheer numbers of lizards. My envy stemmed from the fact that the stories were exotic, involving international travel to islands in the Caribbean both great and small, where supposedly the anoles practically fall out of the trees and astonish you with their diversity and abundance.
Green anole in Arkansas
I would think to myself how comparatively boring my field work must sound: driving in a blue van with New York plates, weaving across state lines, searching for A. carolinensis, the lone species that lives on the continent — the Drosophila melanogaster of an otherwise thrillingly diverse genus. Can there be a more boring species than a lizard with the word “green” in its common name? Even the folks I meet while traveling in the field hint at mundaneness when I tell them what I am looking for: “Where you really need to look is on my aunt’s patio!” Yes sir, I know they often pop up in the begonias, but will they be there when I need them to be (because they never are)? Plus, I have to be in southern Georgia by tomorrow afternoon so I need anoles from this latitude today!
The Brodie Lab at the University of Virginia has developed a manual for breeding and raising anoles in lab colonies, entitled “Anolis Colony Care: A manual developed for the Brodie laboratory at University of Virginia.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to take a lizard pole?” – “No way, we’re on vacation, not field work”.
teasing me
But once arrived on the lovely Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico I just couldn’t get any of the anoles perching on about every single palm tree to dewlap for me. I’d speculate about their dewlap colours – they did look like A. sagrei, but how could I be sure without flipping out their dewlap? And if I did, would it be red or orange, and how broad would the yellow margin be?
It was as if they were mocking me with their presence, knowing that I was pole-less. On the next trip to the local supermarket, however, I saw and immediately grabbed a small package that read: “Fish pen, as seen on TV.” It was a tiny telescopic fishing pole, complete with hooks, reel and line, that can clip to your shirt like a pen. For MXP 200 (ca. $20), I just had to buy it. Although I wouldn’t recommend to hunt any large or skittish lizards with it (it’s a short pole), it proved to be quite effective to satisfy any spontaneous dewlap-flipping cravings during vacation.
With the genome of green anole available for download, anole researchers are apt to face a dilemma related to both experimental design and the taste and judgment of science consumers. My colleagues and I recently published an article in Genome Biology and Evolution in which the anole genome was downloaded for analyses. Spearheaded by bioinformatics guru Charles Chapus, our experiments were conducted in silico. Through conversations with friends and colleagues, we intuited that we might face resistance to our methods because, although our hypotheses and analyses were novel, our raw data were not. Fortunately, this concern, held by some, did not postpone publication of our work, but it did raise an interesting point for discussion. Where is genomic research going, in relation to generation and/or analysis of sequence data? From the perspective of experimental design, the decision to generate new sequence depends on the research question. For population genetics studies, for example, novel sequence generation is efficacious but for whole genome comparisons, why repeat what is freely available for download?
Have you published work based on pre-existing data? How will you decide whether to amplify or download anole sequences for analyses?
Captain Leal and First Mate Kolbe. Photo by Gilligan.
Over at Chipojolab, Manuel Leal has a video and a photograph from last week’s field work on Abaco, Bahamas. The video is of yours truly, failing to noose a wily brown anole, Anolis sagrei. More interesting is the photo of Leal next to an odd looking piece of equipment. What is that gizmo? Here’s a close-up:
By slowing turning the knob at the lower right, the tweezers are pulled downward, allowing the dewlap to be pulled out to maximal extension.
This Rube Goldberg contraption is used to pull out a male’s dewlap to take color readings with a spectrophotometer.
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