Anoles by the Numbers, Part II: Museum of Comparative Zoology

I recently wrote a post on the history of Anolis species descriptions using the Reptile Database (Uetz & Stylianou 2018). This got me thinking, how does my current institution fit into this? I’m currently a grad student in the herp department at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, former home of many anole greats, including Albert Schwartz, Ernest Williams, Skip Lazell, Jonathan Losos (still affiliated but now based at WashU), and many more. And as Jonathan has pointed out previously, it’s home to the greatest number of Anolis specimens of any museum. So I wondered, with such a rich history of anole research, what do our collections look like? How many specimens do we have now? How many species? How has the collection grown over time? So get ready for Anoles by the Numbers Part II: MCZ.

A brief note on methods – all data comes from a spreadsheet I downloaded of all current Anolis specimens in the MCZ from MCZBase (downloaded 2/8/19). For total numbers of specimens per species/subspecies/locality, I simply count records (each record corresponds to a single specimen). For the main summaries of collectors, I treat every collector listed with a specimen as independent, so if someone is listed as the main collector for one specimen but as a “co-collector” for 9 others, they will be summarized as collecting 10 specimens. Due to some formatting issues, a small number of specimens got filtered out (early ones in particular), but I think it’s a pretty good start. I also did a subset of visualizations for the “Top 10 Collectors” – these were defined as the 10 researchers who collected the most specimens overall.

The MCZ was founded in 1859 by Louis Agassiz (more on the history here). The first Anolis specimen collected for the MCZ was an A. carolinensis from Milledgeville, GA collected in 1854 (before the MCZ was founded), but the collector is unknown. I can’t track down much info about that specimen. More Anolis specimens were deposited in 1858 and 1859, and since then, the MCZ Anolis collection has grown to include a total of 52,293 specimens. 44,889 of these have specific info on when they were collected.

So, when were the peak periods of growth for the Anolis collection? Looks like the majority happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

These specimens were collected by 886 researchers. Most collected <100 specimens each, but a few collected tons! (That doesn’t include the prodigious researcher we know and love, “et al.” I took them out of the analysis.) Some of these collectors spread their work over a number of years, while some had very concentrated efforts. The top 10 collectors together collected a whopping 21,564 specimens.

And how many species do these specimens represent? In total, the MCZ has 378 species (out of 427 described), so 88% of species diversity! Not too shabby. About half of the species are represented by <10 specimens, but a fair number of them have tens to hundreds of specimens. Eleven species even have more than 1000 specimens each! From highest to lowest, these are: distichus, cybotes, sagrei, cristatellus, roquet, grahami, marmoratus, gundlachi, lineatopus, brevirostris, and pulchellus (they’re not on the plot below because they cause so much skew).

What about type specimens? While we don’t have the type for the genus Anolis (that honor belongs to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences), we do have 146 species holotypes! Their collection follows a similar pattern to general Anolis collection, with a peak in the 60s-70s, but is more scattered throughout the 1900s.

How were all of these specimens geographically distributed? Unsurprisingly, considering the history of research on Caribbean diversification and ecomorphology at the MCZ, 72% of the specimens in the collection came from Caribbean Islands, with 39% from just the Greater Antilles. Central and North American species make up an additional 22%, while South American species make up only 6%. A few specimens came from introduced populations in Guam, Japan, and Micronesia. Hopefully the collection will continue to grow and expand as the field of anole research does too!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey through MCZ Anolis history. I’m still relatively new to the field of Anolis biology myself, so if you have any insights or perspectives (or suggestions of other things you’re curious to see with this data), please leave them in the comments!