From http://www.dlisted.com/node/41572. Warning: most suggested captions not for family viewing.
Year: 2011 Page 33 of 42
In a press release issued today, the Society for the Study of Evolution announced that effective immediately the name of its flagship journal will change to better reflect its contents and to position the journal at the cutting edge of evolutionary biology. Formerly known as Evolution: International Journal of Organic Evolution, the leading journal in the field will now be known as Evolution: International Journal of Anolis Lizard Evolution.
Anolis schwartzi from St. Eustatius. Photo courtesy Robert Powell.
As the last 40 years of research attests, anoles present a great study system to investigate questions in evolutionary ecology, especially at the macroevolutionary, cross-species level. Indeed, the rich literature on a large variety of topics including sexual dimorphism, ecomorphology, size evolution, biomechanics and many other topics—reviewed in Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree—has made anoles a veritable model system for evolutionary study.
One area that has received surprisingly little attention is behavioral ecology. Anole behavior is remarkably easy to study in the field, at least for many species. And interesting patterns of divergence in behavior (e.g., territory, mating systems, foraging mode) among closely related species, combined with convergence at a deeper phylogenetic level, make anoles an attractive group for such studies.
From the British Medical Journal, 1900
I was recently reading a paper in which the phrase “anoline lizards” was frequently used, and it got me thinking: Just what does “anoline” mean? Is it synonymous with “anole”? And is it correct usage? Needless to say, the word is not in standard dictionaries.
Part of the potential confusion comes from the way it was used in the past, at least by some. Back in the old days, pre-molecular data, the standard wisdom was that the genera Chamaeleolis, Chamaelinorops, and Phenacosaurus were early offshoots of the anole radiation that had evolved prior to Anolis. Hence, Ernest Williams used the term “anoline” to refer to them, as well as Anolis species. In this sense, “anoline” might be construed to apply more broadly than just to members of the genus Anolis (and, of course, should not be confused with “anoloid” which referred to an even broader phylogenetic grouping that included other, more distantly related lizards). In this sense, “anoline” had a technical meaning beyond just Anolis. But…some workers, even back then, referred to these three other genera as “anoles” as well. Moreover, we now are confident that the three genera arose within Anolis, which leads most modern workers to no longer recognize those genera, but rather subsume the species within Anolis (though it is still perfectly appropriate to recognize them as subclades of Anolis).
In what can legitimately be called a taxonomic coup, an Anolis lizard has stolen the cover of Evolution for the third time in 8 months. That’s right folks – 3 out of the last 8 Evolution covers have been anoles (see our coverage of past covers here).
The latest, from the April 2011 issue of Evolution, highlights a new paper by Steve Poe and company about the relationship between deep evolutionary history and recent naturalization success in anoles. The punch line is that anole species endemic to single-species islands share a suite of traits with anoles that have become naturalized outside of their native ranges. Furthermore, the traits of such ‘solitary anoles’ may be used to predict naturalization more generally within Anolis. It’s an interesting paper and it demonstrates the utility of phylogenetic “tree-thinking” in matters relevant to conservation biology. Poe et al. go one step further though, provocatively suggesting that human-mediated anole invasions simply represent the acceleration of already-present ecological and evolutionary processes, and that humans have changed “the tempo, rather than the essence, of omnipresent natural processes” (p. 1200).
Here’s a bigger image of the anole on the cover, courtesy of Steve Poe. It’s Anolis kunayale, which was described by Erik Hulebak and colleagues in 2007.
Photo from http://www.petworldshop.com/
We’ve had a number of posts in recent months on the remarkable variety of anole species available in the pet trade (for example, here and here), particularly in the Europe. Another aspect of the pet trade, however, is the volume at which it occurs, and in this case, it is probably a few common species that make up the bulk of the trade. A recent paper in the Herpetological Journal explored reptile and amphibian commerce in Great Britain over a ten-year period from the mid-1990’s to mid-2000’s. The paper has some interesting points on various aspects of the dynamics of the trade, including how price has changed, the role of captive breeding, and other points. Anoles aren’t a central focus of this paper, but it does report that the price of anoles has increased over time, even after correcting for inflation: 26% in both A. carolinensis and A. sagrei, but only 4% in A. equestris. This was about middle of the pack for lizard species surveyed. Some had become more expensive—more than 400% more in Parson’s chameleon—but about half the species had become cheaper, green iguanas dropping by 69% at the other extreme.
I summarized what I could learn about the anole trade in Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree. It isn’t much, but here’s what I had to say: From 1998–2002, more than 250,000 A. carolinensis and more than 100,000 A. sagrei were legally exported from the United States; in the same period, as many as 30,000 anoles of various species may have been imported into the U.S. Figures for imports into other countries are unavailable, but may be large because there are many reptile hobbyists in Europe. The United States is the only country likely to have much domestic trade in anoles, and these numbers, too, are great because many A. carolinensis and A. sagrei are captured and sold within the United States, not only for the pet trade, but also to laboratories, educational supply companies, and zoos. Data on the magnitude of this trade is scarce, but more than 250,000 anoles were collected in Florida in a four-year period in the early 1990s (this number may be a substantial underestimate because dealers were not required to report the number of the introduced A. sagrei and as a result, most did not do so.). in Louisiana, nearly a million A. carolinensis a year were collected in the mid-1990s, but that number has declined to around 350,000 per year in 2006, apparently as a result of declining demand, rather than shortage of anoles.
- Anolis sagrei displaying. Photo by Valerie Simon.
Anoles are renowned for their displays in which they do pushups, bob their heads up and down, and unfurl their colorful dewlaps. Indeed, the internet is awash with videos of such behavior (here’s a good one of A. sagrei including some cool “slo-mo”; here’s a vicious fight with audience commentary; and for the pacifists out there, here’s a solitary brown anole displaying).
But what’s all the displaying about? And, more specifically, is there any significance to how much a particular male displays?
Stumbling over the search terms leading to the Anole Annals blog today I found this interesting bit of information:
…”afraid of anolis”?
Scoliodentosaurophobia, apparently, is the scientific expression for “fear of lizards”. It’s a category to the more general Herpetophobia (fear of amphibians and/or reptiles). These sorts of fears might seem a little bit odd to the herpetologist… after all I have heard of colleagues having bite lists for fun (“what was the coolest species that ever had its fangs in you?”). But they are surprisingly present amongst laymen and –women out there. Women in Africa would run screaming when they’d see me handling chameleons – fearing that the chameleon’s stare would prevent them from having babies. In the DR, Miguel Landestoy and I were convinced we could help prevent the slaughtering of Haitiophis snakes out of fear by telling farmers that “the girl (me) is not afraid of them either”, appealing to their machismo. The large Dominican green anole Anolis baleatus (and probably some other large crown giants too) has the nickname Salta cocote because it is supposed to jump at people from the trees, trying to suck their blood (“dice la leyenda que le salta a la gente y le muerde el cocote”). An older gentleman seemed very convinced that the Salta cocote had just sucked to death some of his neighbor’s cattle. It even has its own Merengue song (Caco e maco salta cocote, which literally means “you ugly frog head, lizard”).
Phobophobes, by the way, are afraid of phobias.
There’s a nice sequence of an eyelash viper swallowing an Anolis limifrons here (scroll down).