Evolution Meetings 2012: Ecomorphology of Mainland Dactyloa Anoles

The first poster session at Evolution 2012 got off to a great start last weekend with Rosario Castañeda’s poster on ecomorphological evolution in mainland Anolis. Currently a post-doc in the Losos Lab at Harvard, where she’s working to bring Anolis to the Encylopedia of Life, Rosario’s Ph.D. thesis with Kevin de Queiroz and associated publication investigated phylogenetics and ecomorphological diversification of the Dactyloa clade of Anolis. For those who aren’t already familiar with the Dactyloa clade, this group of impressive anoles can be found in the Lesser Antilles and South America. In her poster, Rosario presents results obtained by combining her multi-locus phylogeny with morphometric data.

Using UPGMA analyses of principal component axes extracted from morphological measurements of 50 species of Dactyloa and 28 species from the Greater Antilles, Rosario initially reported recovering nine distinct morphological clusters (four of which include only one species). Rosario further reported that these phenotypic clusters do not correspond with monophyletic groups on her phylogenetic tree, suggesting that each cluster did not simply evolve a single time. Finally, Rosario used distances among species in morphometric space to show that fifteen species in the Dactyloa clade are similar to one of the replicated Greater Antillean anole ecomorphs. She specifically reported that species from the Dactyloa clade can be assigned to trunk-crown, trunk-ground, and twig ecomorphs.