We’re now at the halfway point in the World Congress, and so far its been fabulous. As noted previously, most of the anole action is backloaded into the last two days, especially Monday, which explains in part the radio silence on AA thus far. The other reasons for the lack of reportage are that, first, the meeting has been non-stop, leaving little time for posting and, second, that many of AA’s contributors spent all yesterday afternoon in the inaugural meeting of the Anoline Lizard Specialist Group, discussing anole conservation issues, and thus missed a number of anole talks. We’ll hear more about ALGS later, and hopefully other WCH attendees will jump into the void and tell us what we missed yesterday.

Your intrepid correspondent did sneak out of the ALGS meeting to catch one talk yesterday. Joe-Felix Bienentreu of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt reported on his studies of the A. pachypus species complex in Central America. In recent years, the group has been split into five species; Bienentreu focused on variation in pachypus itself, which occurs in Costa Rica and western Panama. Within this range, the species shows considerable variation in dewlap color, with some red, some yellow, and some containing both; in all, five groups were initially identified based on dewlap color. An examination of 40 scale and morphological characters for more than 200 specimens across this range led to grouping the first initial groups into two main groups. Genetic analysis with mitochondrial DNA is partially congruent with these groups, but shows some discrepancies.

Jonathan Losos
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