More than six years in the making, costing untold millions, the fully sequenced genome of A. carolinensis is coming soon to a journal near you. After many promised delivery dates have come and gone, a blockbuster draft manuscript has finally arrived in the hands of its coauthors. Hopefully, things now will move expeditiously and the paper will be published before too much longer, at last bringing the genetic wonders of anoles to the world at large.
Year: 2011 Page 34 of 42
Photo from March, 2011 issue of Copeia
From the pages of Copeia: The Henry S. Fitch Award for Excellence in Herpetology is given annually to an individual for long-term excellence in the study of amphibian and or reptile biology. In addition to consideration of the research portfolio, the committee also considers the educational and service impacts of the individual’s career. The award has been given annually since 1998 and like previous winners of the award this year’s Fitch Award winner has a long career that focuses on ecology and evolution and he has directed his attention on lizards. The Fitch Committee was chaired by Maureen Kearney in 2010. Whitfield Gibbons and Jonathan Losos served as committee members and were elected by the ASIH board of governors. This year the committee had to select from among several strong nominations and their deliberations were a challenge. According to the member that nominated this year’s winner, our 2010 awardee is one of the greatest zoologists of our time. His contributions to theoretical ecology and evolutionary biology are immense; he is the author of six Citation Classics. The publication record of the 2010 Fitch winner more than demonstrates long-term excellence for study in the field of herpetology. The curriculum vitae of this year’s Fitch awardee is impressive for its depth and its breadth, and he early on defined the “fundamental questions” most ecologists ask of their organisms. Several ecological themes emerge when one examines his body of peer-reviewed publications: foraging ecology, foraging theory, resource partitioning, niche quantification, spatial ecology, population biology, competition, niche shifts, island ecology, effects of predators on prey, food web dynamics, and effects of hurricanes on island taxa. While the vast majority of scientific papers focus on lizards, our awardee has also published extensively on birds, spiders, and even plants in his attempt to understand the fundamental ecology of organisms. This year’s winner was the first chairperson of the Department of Evolution and Ecology at UC Davis and one of the youngest scientists ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Variation in female A. sagrei patterns. Figure from Calsbeek et al. (2010)
Many species of anoles exhibit sexual dimorphism in back patterning, often with the male being relatively uniform and the female festooned with stripes, diamonds, speckles or other geometries (in a few cases, the situation is reversed and the males are the dandies). Surprisingly, there are no reviews documenting the extent of this phenomenon, much less comparative studies explaining its significance (adaptive or otherwise).
Perhaps even more interesting, in some species females exhibit multiple pattern phenotypes within a single population. Most study to date has focused on A. sagrei in the Bahamas. The seminal paper on this topic was Schoener and Schoener’s 1976 study in Evolution, which suggested that pattern variation was related to crypsis, with different patterns being more cryptic in different parts of the structural habitat (e.g., stripes are cryptic on narrow branches). In support of this hypothesis, the Schoeners showed that within a locality, females with different patterns occurred in different parts of the habitat, and among sites, the relative frequency of the types varied in relation to inter-site variation in vegetation.
The cover of Anolis Newsletter III, supposedly resembling Ernest Williams
“It was while walking along a hedge row in the Dominican Republic, listening to a complaint that I and some of my co-workers did not frame hypotheses every day while in the field, that I invented (or recognized) the PRINCIPLE OF UNSYMPATHETIC MAGIC. This states that, if one arrives at any firm and vivid conviction about matters of fact or theory in the field, the NEXT observation will provide a contradiction.
“The principle is easily confirmed by any field worker. Note, however, that NATURE IS NOT DECEIVED. No opinion merely pretended to, i.e. not held with fierce conviction, will be responded to by a conclusive observation. The MALICE OF NATURE prohibits the PRINCIPLE OF UNSYMPATHETIC MAGIC from being a source of satisfaction to the field worker.”
—Ernest E. Williams in “The Third Anolis Newsletter,” 1977.
The Principle of Unsympathetic Magic, once you’ve learned of it, surfaces everywhere.
The Hamm Reptile Show, operated by Terraristika Hamm, is said to be the largest reptile expo in the world. Several shows are held a year, the most recent 2½ weeks ago. One AA correspondent reports there were “plenty of captive bred anole species. For example: barbatus, porcus, valencienni, noblei, bartschi, roquet, baracoae, allisoni. I think more than 25 species available just on this show.” It’s surprisingly hard to get information on the show on the internet. Can any of our readers tell us more?
"The rediscovery of a missing anole"
Everyone’s favorite anole, A. proboscis, is featured in an article in the most recent issue of Lacerta. The article is chockful of beautiful pictures, such as the one above, but does have one shortcoming, at least for most of AA’s readers: it’s in Dutch! However, thanks to Harvard undergrad Jelle Zijlstra, we can provide a translation of at least part of the text.
Jelle writes:
Wade Davis, explorer extraordinaire, made his name as a graduate student at Harvard by proposing not only that Haitian zombies were real, but that they were created by ingesting concoctions that include tetrodotoxin, the toxin in pufferfish and the infamous Japanese delicacy, fugu. When the victim recovers (if he does), he believes he has become a zombie, and this belief is then taken advantage of by the voodoo priest.
Davis first reported his hypothesis, controversial to this day, in a 1983 paper. In that paper, he reports the results of three expeditions to Haiti, in which he documented the preparation of five separate zombie potions in four different villages. The process by which the potion is created is an elaborate and intricate ceremony, which the gentle reader may learn about by reading the aforementioned paper. For our purposes here, the interesting issue is the ingredients that go into the potion.
The website anolissen.nl has a collection of reasonably high quality anole videos, including one of Terry Ord’s behavior research, featured yesterday, as well as A. allisoni from Cuba fighting; many Cuban species displaying, including A. allogus (or was it A. ahli?) and A. mestrei; A. cuvieri displaying; A. punctatus displaying; a green anole (who can identify it?) eating a butterfly; and a bonus outgroup track of Polychrus acutirostris, as well as others.
The Puerto Rican grass-bush anole, A. pulchellus, displaying. Recent research indicates that this and some other, but not all, anole species time their displays to occur when the wind isn't blowing. Photo @ Rich Glor.
Successful communication requires that a message be detected by the intended receiver. One trick animals have when they communicate is to use signals that stand out against the background, so that they are more easily detected, such as waving light colored structures against a dark background, or making high-pitched calls when surrounded by low-pitched sounds. But what happens when the background isn’t constant? Just as we tend to talk when conversation partners are quiet, animals would be expected to signal at those times when their signals contrast to the greatest extent with the background and thus are most detectable. Reasonable as this hypothesis is, it has only been tested once, in a study which showed that lab monkeys vocalized in silent periods between bursts of machine generated white noise.
Anoles signal primarily in two ways, by moving their head and body up-and-down and by extending their dewlaps. With regard to the former, research has shown that headbobs are effective at catching the attention of other lizards because the rapid and jerky movements contrast strongly with motion in the background. However, this is only true when, in fact, the background—that is, the vegetation and other stuff behind the lizard—isn’t moving very much. When the wind is blowing and leaves and branches are swaying back and forth, headbobs should be more difficult to detect. Consequently, on a windy day, a savvy anole should time its headbobs to occur when the wind is not blowing.
And that’s just what they do—at least some of them.
- Photo by Aaron Reedy
Dan Warner and Aaron Reedy caught this male A. sagrei in September of last year on a spoil island at Tomoka State Park in Ormond Beach, FL.