Artwork by Ryane Logsdon.
Year: 2012 Page 2 of 47
Earlier this year Jonathan Losos posted about a decorative anole figurine. I was lucky enough to receive one of these priceless collector’s items as a holiday gift. Because I am thoroughly amused by the story of Anna the Anole I thought that I would share her story here.
If you’re like me, you can’t get enough anole videos. So, what a surprise it was to learn that Cornell’s fabled Lab of O has a repository of 147 anole videos. Many of them are from Cuba, taken by Eric Liner, and include footage of Chamaeleolis, A. smallwoodi, and other cool Cubans. I haven’t checked most of them out yet, but it seems like a great resource.
Eric Enrique Flores de Gracia, a Panamanian graduate student based in the UK, sends in the following. Can anyone help?:
Besides my own Ph.D. research focus, I like to explore and monitor biodiversity of amphibians and reptiles among others, in the central mountains of Panama (part of the Talamanca eco-region). During a field campaign in the buffer zone of the Santa Fe National Park, we found a curious lizard on a Nispero (Terminalia amazonica) tree. Sadly, we were running out of time and only took the attached picture and since our main focus was not to survey herps at that moment, we released the lizard. I will appreciate if you have any clue as to what species it could be? By the way, we started a small monitoring program in 2011 in a never before explored area with some students from the University in Veraguas province.
Steve Poe writes: “Several island sites are famous among anolologists for harboring multiple sympatric species. Soroa in Cuba, La Palma in the Dominican Republic, and El Yunque in Puerto Rico each have been well-studied by community ecologists. But many mainland sites are populated by anole communities that meet or exceed the diversity levels of these island sites. One such hyperdiverse mainland locality is El Cope in Panama. Twelve species of Anolis may be collected within 100 meters of the field house at El Cope.
Identification of mainland anoles can be difficult as there are fewer resources available relative to those for anoles in the Caribbean. We have produced two-panel powerpoint guides for El Cope that should aid in identification of anoles in and around these sites.”
Small versions are attached below and the full size version can be accessed here (be patient on the download–it’s a big file).
Well, more precisely, anoles are more smarter than you might think than chimps are smarter than you might think, according to the Daily Planet TV that airs on the Canadian Discovery Channel. Yesterday’s episode includeded a segment “Ten Animals that Are Smarter Than You Think” that featured the cognitive abilities of Puerto Rican green anoles (A. evermanni) based on the work of (and showing a video made by) Manuel Leal.
Since my previous posts on Roatanian anoles, it’s come to my attention that A. sagrei has not been sighted on Roatan in quite a long time, and in fact some believe that it was never there at all. The photo to the left should dispel any such rumors. It certainly isn’t common–from my very brief time there–but it’s present. Said to be introduced in McCranie et al.’s book on Bay Islands herps.
You would have thought that Anolis allisoni couldn’t get any more handsome!
This one from Susan Perkins will be hard to top.