2011 – Page 6 – Anole Annals

Yellow Anole Eggs

On December 10, 2011

In Notes from the Field, Research Methods

A 'slug' next to a healthy, freshly laid egg. The scale bars in millimeters.

Anyone who’s raised anoles has likely run across the occasional slug. I’m not talking about shell-less gastropod mollusks, but rather about the flaccid yellow eggs that anoles lay from time to time. Slugs are uncalcified and generally considered infertile. Because slugs never develop viable embryos and tend to quickly rot when incubated most lizard keepers simply discard them. Is there anything to be learned from slugs? In our colony, we tend to recover the most slugs early and late in the breeding season, but we’re not sure why this is the case. Is it possible that the male and female are a bit out of sync, or that the female is priming her reproductive tract for the real deal? We’re also recovering more slugs in our hybrid crosses than in pure crosses, but we’ll have more on that later. Are any reproductive physiologists out there more familiar with the mechanisms responsible for production of slugs?

More Anoles from Day’s Edge Productions

By Yoel Stuart

On December 10, 2011

In All Posts

Screen shot of Anolis sagrei male and female from The Runner

Anole Annals regulars Nathan Dappen and Neil Losin, of Day’s Edge Productions, have won another prize for their filmmaking. This time, it’s for their entry, The Runner, in the World Wildlife Fund video competition themed “Life. Nature. You. Make the Connection.”

Screen shot of Anolis carolinensis male from The Runner

Footage of Anolis sagrei and A. carolinensis in Miami plays during seconds 40-45.

How Far Has the Brown Anole Invaded?

By Jonathan Losos

On December 9, 2011

In Notes from the Field

In a recent post, Alison Devan reported the presence of the brown anole, A. sagrei, in Savannah, GA. That prompted AA to inquire on the HerpGuide Facebook page where else the brown anole has been seen in the southeastern U.S., other than Florida and Louisiana. You can see for yourself the responses above, to which I can add a lawyer’s office in Boston and a plane out of Denver. Anyone else seen sagrei getting about? Any predictions how far it’ll spread (see this recent post for a distribution map of sagrei in the southeast today)?

By the way, the HerpGuide FB page is a place for people to post herp photos to be identified, as well as other herp related items. Worth joining.

New Host, New Look

By Rich Glor

On December 9, 2011

In All Posts

If you’re here, you’ve caught on to the fact that we’ve moved to our new home at anoleannals.org. We’re having a header photo contest to celebrate this move, but before introducing the contest I need to cover some important information about the move.

First, I want to say thanks to Melissa Woolley for making the move possible. Melissa moved the entirety of past Annals – including posts, comments, categories, and tags – to a new server, so you can just keep on using the new blog the same way you did the old one. Note that comments and posts on the new anoleannals.org site will not appear at the old anoleannals.wordpress.com, and vice versa. To avoid confusion, the old blog will soon disappear entirely from view. Melissa painstakingly created new accounts for all of our old users on the new system, but you might need to reset your password, which you can do here. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this might cause and welcome any feedback about how we could further smooth the transition. Temporary glitches aside, this move permits us to make some much needed improvements and expansions to the blog (we’ll introduce one such improvement very shortly!). Those of you who routinely get to us by Googling “Anole Annals,” should use this opportunity to bookmark our new page!

OK, on to the photo contest! We’re looking for new header images and need your help. We’ll likely do a reader poll to pick a few winners among the entries received, but the precise format of the contest will depend upon the number of entries we get. Winning photos will earn a place of honor among our set of rotating header images. In order to be considered, an image must be precisely 1000 pixels wide by 288 pixels high. We’ll credit you as photographer wherever possible, but ask that images not include any text or watermarks. You can submit your images using our blog’s new ability to easily add images to a comment; just click the “Choose File” link beneath the comment box and navigate to your JPEG photo. I can’t wait to see all of your amazing anole images!

Anoles on Genbank

By Anthony J Geneva

On December 9, 2011

In Anole Genome Research, New Research

With the recent sequencing of the Anolis carolinensis genome and Thom’s recent post on resources for other anole species I got to wondering how many DNA sequences are available for anoles? In an effort to answer this question, I searched for DNA sequence data from Anolis and other genera now considered part of Anolis (Norops, Chamaeleolis, Chamaelinorops, and Phenacosaurus) on the NCBI’s popular GenBank database. I found that Genbank‘s nucleotide database contains over 29,ooo unique anole sequences. Not surprisingly, the most sequence (25,973) are from A. carolinensis. Remaining sequences are divided among 216 anole species. The top species after carolinensis are: krugi (433), distichus (378), sagrei (351) and cristatellus (328). Is anyone else surprised by these totals? I would have guessed sagrei would be second. I think A. distichus will at least double in the next few years, partly because I’m doing lots of sequencing from this species myself.

Only 29 species are represented by more than 10 sequences and half of the 216 species represented in GenBank are represented by a single (usually mitochondrial) sequence. The availability of this data highlights our prospects for asking evolutionary and ecological questions across the rest of anoline diversity, but also highlights the huge amount of work ahead if we are interested in making broad genus-wide comparisons. Admittedly, Genebank lags behind current research as most of us only post sequences at the time of publication (we have hundreds of sequences to be added in the next few years).

Can You Spot the Sleeping Anole?

By Daniel Scantlebury

On December 8, 2011

In Anole Annals Trivia, Natural History Observations, Notes from the Field

Somewhere in this photo is a sleeping anole. The species is one that has only been reported from the Dominican Republic a few times.

If you can find the sleeping anole in those photo, you will have contributed to cataloging the anole fauna of the Dominican Republic. Points if you can identify the species. Hint – the photo was taken on the northern slopes of the Sierra de Bahorucco approx. 12km east of the Haitian border.

The Kings of Greater Antillean Anole Taxonomy II: Thomas Barbour

By Rich Glor

On December 8, 2011

In Classics from the Literature

I previously introduced my mission to recognize the five anole systematists responsible for describing the majority of the anole species found in the Greater Antilles. The first king of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy was the prolific E. D. Cope. Cope was the last in a line of authors who described anole species that he’d never actually spent time with in the field (see also Duméril and Bibron). The next king on my list, by contrast, was an avid field biologist and conducted field work in the West Indies throughout his career.

Evolution of a Lizard Room, Part VI: Generating Food In House

By Rich Glor

On December 7, 2011

In Research Methods

Adult Gryllodes (image from http://www.just-green.com/)

In a previous post on the evolution of the Glor Lab’s lizard room, Julienne discussed our general strategy for acquiring anole food. As Julienne discussed, the crickets for our adult lizards are obtained primarily in the form of bi-weekly shipments from Fluker Farms. However, we also have a fairly large cricket breeding operation that provides many of the small crickets required by our hatchling lizards. One reason for maintaining this colony is that Flukers does not reliably supply pin-heads that are small enough for some of our newest additions. Another reason for maintaining this colony is the hope that this colony will eventually grow to the point that it also supplies feeder crickets to the remainder of our colony. One somewhat unusual thing about our colony is stocked with Gryllodes rather than Acheta (the type of cricket that you get from Flukers and other large cricket farms).

One Night in Antigua – Photos from a Layover with the Colossus Anolis leachii

By Martha Muñoz

On December 7, 2011

In Classics from the Literature, Natural History Observations

Early morning sighting of a female Anolis leachii on a leaf covered in raindrops.

Sometimes, they say, it’s about the journey, not the destination. This makes me think of exciting layovers I’ve had in Anolis country. At any place where the layover is long enough to permit stepping outside of the airport, I like to pop out and see what kind of anoles I can find lurking around the terminals. On a few occasions, travel requires an overnight stay in an exciting place. One of the benefits of working in remote Lesser Antillean islands is that infrequent (and unpredictable) airline schedules typically mean spending a night or two in tiny islands to and from the actual destination. For years I’ve been working in Montserrat, a small island with an active volcano, where I try to follow the flighty bugger Anolis lividus as close to the volcano as I can get. On our way home from Montserrat, we usually spend a night in Antigua, where the charming giant, Anolis leachii can be found.

View of a raincloud and rainbow as we descended into Antigua in January 2009.

Like most anoles from the Lesser Antilles, this species is abundant. However, few species from the Lesser Antilles are as large as A. leachii. It is a member of the bimaculatus clade of large anoles from the Northern Lesser Antilles. According to Scwhartz and Henderson (1991), it can reach a snout-vent length of 123 mm. For anyone who works with crown-giants, this may not seem so large, but for an aficionado of the Lesser Antillean anoles, Anolis leachii is a relative behemoth! Its body ranges from yellow to blue and green, and it’s covered in a purplish vermiculation. The large eyering ranges from a sulfurous yellow to a deep orange. Hands down, this is one of the world’s most beautiful anoles. Imagine my excitement when I got to spend a night chasing these lizards through the wilds of Antigua Village, a cushy beach resort teeming with Anolis leachii and the smaller congener, A. wattsii. Here I offer some photos of this dazzling species, and a bit of its taxonomic history.