I think it’s time we had a talk. How do I put this? There’s going to come a time in your life where you start to notice, you know, things around you that maybe you didn’t notice before. You might not fully understand it, it can be confusing, and, well, I just want to make sure you’re prepared. What am I trying to say? Well, er, I’ll just say it. Anole sex. That’s right. That magical event when a male anole and his old lady get together to make sweet love. There have been a some posts recently on the morphology of the male’s one-twig-per-berry genitalia, anole copulation, and Isabella Rossellini. I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring focusing on the behaviors anoles exhibit while copulating, accompanied by a video of mating A. stratulus, a species of Puerto Rican trunk-crown anole.

The video starts out with the male displaying with bobs and dewlap, and moving a lot, appearing agitated. From what I’ve seen in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas, this is classic male anole hallelujah-I-think-I-might-get-lucky behavior. When the camera moves to the female and the male approaches her, you see her adopt a receptive posture. The male does a couple of push-ups, then bites her neck and the act begins.

During copulation both the male and the female bob, and the male displays his dewlap. Displaying during mating is common in anoles, and from the video you can see that these displays, and especially the dewlap, are pretty conspicuous. Which leads me to wonder why in the world they do it? This is brazen behavior. I saw lizard cuckoos and crown giant anoles (A. cuvieri) at this site on a daily basis, and I doubt either of these predators would pass up on a two-for-one meal if they saw it. Displaying seems to greatly increase the risk of an already compromising and thus dangerous pastime. Is it just a correlated response to the excited physiological state that likely accompanies copulation? Are the males and females communicating with each other? Good old-fashioned exhibitionism? David Crews has published some interesting work on anole display and female receptivity, but I’ve never seen anything that explicitly addresses the topic of display during the act of mating.

Alex Gunderson
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