I am an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Camden. I use a variety of evolutionary genetic approaches to ask questions about gene flow, adaptation and speciation.
I live in Los Angeles, CA where I am an Assistant Professor of evolutionary biology at UCLA. I spend most of my time studying how species around the globe evolve and adapt in response to climate change and human disturbance. I use a wide variety of tools in this work, including genetics, physiology and climate modeling. When I’m not researching, I spend time creating and hosting The Biology of Superheroes Podcast, where my co-host and I nerd out about the science of comic books, movies, TV shows and other science fiction.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
I study how anoles adapt and acclimate to changes in temperature. Temperature is a universal stress for all life on the planet and can have dramatic impacts on how species live, from how fast they can run to how well the proteins in their cells perform. Reptiles and other cold blooded animals are great to explore thermal biology because they can’t make their own body heat. This means that their behavior and performance are really tightly linked to environmental temperatures. The most surprising thing I’ve learned in my work is just how fast anoles can respond to shifting temperatures. We can see the signatures of this response over very short timeframes in response to extreme weather events and the high temperatures in cities, even within a single year.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
I grew up in South Carolina, so anoles were some of the first animals I ever interacted with as a child. As a matter of fact, the anole that I studied in graduate school, the green anole, was the very first animal I ever caught as a kid. Most anoles are pretty small, but I think they have a ton of personality.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
Anoles seem to find remarkable ways of dealing with environmental change, which makes them very fun to study. They’ve found pretty interesting ways to deal with hurricanes, winter storms, city life and other extreme environments. What most interesting is that we can see how they respond in real-time. This gives us really interesting insights into how life finds its way on our planet despite the many challenges it can be faced with, including us.
What is your favorite anole species?
I’m probably the outlier among most anole biologists, because I love the green anole. It’s not a fancy as many other species, but it just has a special place in my heart at a southern boy. Plus, it’s given me great opportunities to learn about evolution and the biological impacts of humans on the planet.
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
I’m a biologist and environmental scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. I lead a research group that tries to understand how the complex web of interactions between different species—including humans—shapes the world around us. My group does a lot of work in Africa, but we also work in the Caribbean, on anoles.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
In 2011, I started a long-term experiment in the Bahamas, aiming to understand how predators influence the ability of different anole species to coexist on islands. We find that in the presence of predators, anoles alter their behavior to reduce their likelihood of being eaten. This can alter the competitive relationships between different anole species—the remarkable ‘niche partitioning’ of anoles, with different species are specialized to live in different parts of the habitat, becomes disrupted. Competition becomes more intense, which can reduce the likelihood of multiple anole species being able to coexist. We are continuing to follow this experiment to learn about both the ecological and evolutionary consequences of introducing predators onto islands.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
I started studying anoles when I had a pet green anole as a kid in North Carolina. I was particularly interested in figuring out what kinds of foods it would eat, so that I could keep it alive, which I did by experimenting with different insects that I caught outside. I found that my pet anole really liked to eat beetle larvae that I collected from rotting acorns. These days, my lab studies anole diets using a technique known as DNA metabarcoding, wherein we sequence the insect DNA in anole fecal samples and use those DNA sequences to identify the insect species that the anoles have been eating.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
What I love most about anoles is that they provide a beautiful opportunity to study some of the most important unsolved mysteries in ecology and evolutionary biology. How does biological diversity arise? How is it maintained? What are the mechanisms by which different species manage to coexist in the same place, despite competition? These questions are relevant to understanding all of life on Earth, and anoles provide a perfect ‘model system’ for studying them using creative experiments in both the field and the laboratory. But they’re also cute and charismatic—and sometimes hilarious—and its hard not to love that.
What is your favorite anole species?
Anolis smaragdinus, the Bahamian green anole. Not only is it a stately lizard, it’s also the underdog in our experiment, so I’m always pulling for it to thrive.
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
I live in Austin, Texas, where I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2015 – 2018 I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and I received my PhD in Biology from Stanford University in 2015.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
I am broadly interested in using the fossil record to understand how species are impacted by past instances of environmental perturbations, such as climate change, seal-level fluctuations, and human colonization. By understanding how different organisms responded to environmental change, I can make predictions about which species may thrive and which species may be threatened under current and future instances of environmental change.
I apply this broad framework to ancient lizard communities in the Caribbean, where anoles are key players. I’ve learned that compared to other lizard species that also occur in the Caribbean, like the curly-tails (Leiocephalus), anoles are very resilient when facing environmental changes. They have a significantly lower rate of extinction than other Caribbean lizards, and I have documented cases where their abundances increase substantially after the extinction of other lizard species in their community. I have also learned that the distributional ranges of different anole species have changed over time, and I am in the process of determining if those range shifts coincide with changes in the environment, such as forest cover.
To accomplish this, I spend a lot of time in the field and in museum collections. I conduct paleontological excavations in search of new fossil deposits on islands such as Puerto Rico and Marie-Galante (a small overseas French territory in the Lesser Antilles). These fossils are pretty young by paleontological standards (typically 30,000 years old or younger) but they are great for the Caribbean, where fossil deposits are rare due to the hot, humid, weather that prevents fossil preservation. What is also great about this time period is that the environmental changes that took place more closely reflect ongoing environmental changes, and many of these sites document the arrival of indigenous and European human populations into the Caribbean, so we can see what communities looked like before humans arrived and also afterwards. In the museum, I use previously collected modern specimens of anoles to help identify the fossils I find in the field, and I also utilize previously collected fossils from different paleontological site in order to compare ecological and evolutionary patterns across space and time.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
Although I had known that I wanted to be a researcher for quite some time growing up, I never thought that I would be studying anoles! I came into graduate school with a background in paleontology, phylogeography, and island biogeography. I had experience with herps (amphibians and reptiles), but I did not consider myself a herpetologist. All I really wanted to do was synthesize my passions for paleontology and conservation with my interests in molecular biology and evolutionary ecology. Right before I started graduate school at Stanford, Dr. Joan Roughgarden gave my PhD advisor some anole paleontological samples. Because of my interests and background, we though that these materials would be perfect for addressing the research questions that I wanted to tackle, and boy were we right! Additionally, those materials opened my eyes to a whole new world of research that I had not encountered before.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
I love that anoles are amenable to studying a diversity of biological questions! Anole research runs the gamut from behavioral, physiological, phylogenetic, developmental, genomic, to ecological and beyond. As a result, there is a rich literature on anoles that helps to contextualize the research that people like me want to do. Despite all of this knowledge, there is still so much that we don’t know, too. Anoles are also very charismatic to watch in the field and the people who study anoles are a great group. It helps to be in a supportive, intellectually diverse, and curious research community. The anole research community, which spans the globe, is that and more!
What is your favorite anole species?
This is a tough question because there are so many anoles out there! I spent a lot of time working on anoles in the Lesser Antilles and I think that they are particularly enigmatic and don’t always get the attention that they deserve. The most beautiful species that I have ever seen in person is Anolis marmoratus, a species only found on the island of Guadeloupe. There are different color morphs on different parts of the island.
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
I am Boricua, and currently an Associate Professor in the Division of Biological Sciences at University of Missouri, Columbia. I have been extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with many talented undergraduate and graduate students that have joined my lab ( Chipojo Lab) and helped me study anoles across the Caribbean. I also had amazing mentors (Richard Thomas, Javier Rodrígues-Robez, Jonathan B. Losos, and Leo J. Fleishman), all willing (may be my stubbornness contributed to their will) to take a risk and allow me to explore ideas regardless of how little sense they made at the time.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
As a natural historian, I have established an integrative research program that reflects my interest in developing an intimate understanding of the behavior, ecology, and physiology of anoles under natural conditions, with the ultimate goal of elucidating evolutionary processes. I encourage all members of my lab to follow a similar approach.
Over 30+ years of studying anoles in their natural habitats, I have learned two fundamental lessons: expect the unexpected and that there is no such a thing as “a stupid question” when the question is derived from observations made in nature. Following this approach, my lab has been able to reveal some unexpected behaviors in anoles, including displaying to predators to deter an attack; finding their way home from distances several order of magnitudes larger than the size of their territories. If that was not unexpected, who would have predicted that anoles would be able to solve novel problems similar to those solved by birds and mammals. Or that anoles would be capable of modulating the properties of their signals to compensate for variation in the distance to potential receivers under the complex conditions of a tropical forest.
Finally, it is impossible to work with anoles and fail to recognize the incredible diversity of dewlap coloration found in the genus. I’ve been lucky enough, with a few of my colleagues, to provide a potential explanation for this diversity by demonstrating experimentally that dewlap spectral properties (i.e., coloration) are shaped by selection favoring detection by conspecifics under the specific light conditions of the micro-habitat most commonly used by the species. Furthermore, we have shown that selection can favor changes in morphological and physiological traits over ecological time-scale.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
Growing up in Puerto Rico my interests in the natural history of anoles began during my childhood. I remember vividly catching anoles around my house, and holding them with a noose made out of the stem of grass tied around their waist. I would then place the anoles in close proximity to observe how they displayed to each other. At the time I had no idea how many species of anoles were found in Puerto Rico. However, I learned that if I held two lizards that had similar appearance close together, they usually would display and even fight. Yet, if I did the same with a “brown one” (A. cristatellus) and a “yellow one” (A. pulchellus), they rarely fought. Little did I know that these early observations would come full circle when I was an undergraduate at University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, working in the laboratory of Richard Thomas. In Richard’s lab I met Javier Rodríguez-Robles, who was working on the feeding behavior of the snake Alsophis portoricencesis. Javier invited me to help him with his research, and while doing so, I observed that anoles also displayed to snakes. This observation became the foundation for my graduate research as I pursued both MS and Ph.D. degrees.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
There is plenty to like about working with anoles. First and foremost is the ability to study them under natural conditions. Many species can be relatively easy to study in the field, allowing one to ask and answer questions under conditions relevant to their biology. A close second is the diversity found in this group, which provides a unique opportunity to study questions at multiple levels (i.e., the individual, population, and community). Finally, anoles are naturally charismatic creatures, which is great for my other passion-photography and science outreach. I find it incredibly rewarding to bring an anole to a classroom of kids or to share my photos and videos of lizards and to see the interests they spark in the kids. It’s even more rewarding when I overhear someone exclaim “what amazing and intriguing behaviors those little lizards have!”
What is your favorite anole species?
I don’t have a favorite anole species. Instead, I have a favorite anole genus — Chamaeleolis, which is endemic to Cuba. Cubans commonly refer to members of this genus as “Chipojo bobo” due to their sluggish appearance. As a kid my Dad told me stories of a big gray arboreal lizard, with a disproportionally big head and that walks very slowly. He called them “chipojos” and lamented the fact that they were not found in Puerto Rico. It is not a coincidence that my lab is known as the Chipojo Lab, a name that recognizes the Cuban roots of my family and also reflects my favorite group of anoles. I was very lucky that I was able to study the behavior of two species of Chipojo bobo, C. barbatus and C. porcus, as part of fieldwork that I did in Cuba in 1997 and 1999. It should be noted that Chipojo bobos are greatly understudied, with only a handful of studies describing their natural history.
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
I live and work in Toronto, Canada where I’m an Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. At the university I teach classes in macroevolution and herpetology, and I lead a research lab focused on the ecology and evolution of Anolis lizards. The central aim of our work is to understand how historical and ecological factors interact to produce large-scale patterns of biodiversity. My group’s research involves a combination of laboratory work, computer work, and fieldwork, and one of the perks of my job is that it frequently takes me to the many diverse and interesting places where anoles live in the wild.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
One of the central aims of my research has been to investigate how ecological factors – such as competition between species – shape evolution over very long time periods (millions of years – i.e., over macroevolutionary timescales). To answer these questions, I first reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of anoles by analyzing their DNA, resulting in a phylogeny, or evolutionary tree. I then use this phylogeny to examine the history of past evolutionary changes for the group, and to ask questions about the causes of such changes.
Applying such techniques, I’ve learned that the rate of trait evolution can be higher when anoles speciate and adapt in the absence of ecological competitors, slowing down as competing species eventually accumulate. Using similar approaches, I found evidence that while the ecological niches of anoles can evolve quite rapidly when opportunity knocks, they can also remain stable for many millions of years following an initial burst of diversification and adaptive evolution.
Recently, my lab has also begun to study how anoles are responding to global change wrought by humans (e.g., due to the conversion of forest habitat to pasture or agriculture). One interesting recent discovery is that anole communities respond differently to deforestation in lowland versus highland environments on Hispaniola. In the lowlands, deforestation results in reduced abundances of anoles, but causes little change in what species occur at a site. In the highlands, however, deforestation has little effect on anoles abundances, but results in a complete turnover in the species that occupy the site. Specifically, the forest-specialist highland anole species disappear with the forests they require, and are replaced by heat-loving opportunists from the lowlands, which thrive in the new, and relatively warm, pasture habitats. These results suggest that the response of anole communities to deforestation depends on climate and altitude, and that accounting for these factors will be key to predicting future biodiversity change.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
I love working on anoles, but that was not always the case! When I started grad school, I wasn’t keen on working with anoles precisely because they were such a well-studied group. My (somewhat naïve) impression was that all the interesting stuff had already been figured out, and that my efforts would be better spent working on a less well-known group (e.g., African chameleons, or Asian skinks). Indeed I began my grad studies by collecting preliminary data on such groups, with somewhat mixed success. At the same time, I began working on anoles “on the side,” participating in a project investigating patterns of evolution in mainland versus island radiations of anoles. Slowly I began investing more in this work, and of course encountered new, unanswered questions that led to yet more work. Before I knew it, I was working on anoles a LOT, and to my surprise I (1) was really enjoying it, and (2) was making real progress answering the sorts of questions that had always interested me. It was an organic process, but before long these ideas coalesced into a PhD thesis project on rates and patterns of macroevolution in anoles. What I learned along the way is that there are always more scientific questions to ask – contrary to my initial intuition, all that previous research on anoles in fact made it possible to ask deeper and more exciting questions by studying the group.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
The pragmatic part of my answer is that I love their replication. Anoles are an unusually excellent study group because when they do something (e.g., evolve to live in shallow caves, or to live in grass tussocks, or to use freshwater streams, or even to have a fleshy horn mounted on their snout), they typically do it multiple times. This replication allows us to make comparisons that can help us tease out the most important mechanisms behind macroevolutionary change (e.g., via statistical analysis). Anoles have diversified throughout the New World tropics both in continental settings and on the islands of the West Indies, and this means that they’ve evolved for millions of years in similar (and different) ecological settings many times independently. Anoles are effectively a “natural experiment” for macroevolution, and they provide us a rare opportunity to investigate how repeatable macroevolution can be, and to identify the factors that influence it the most.
The other part of my answer is that anoles always have something new to teach us. Even for species I feel like I know very well, I’m constantly learning something unexpected about them – both during my own fieldwork, and also from creative published work by others. The pace of discovery is rapid in anoles, and that makes working on the group a lot of fun.
What is your favorite anole species?
This is an impossible question. I’ve listed a provisional “top 10” below, from the top of my head. Any of these could change at any point, especially if I get the chance to see Anolis megalopithecus or any member of the Chamaeleolis clade in the wild!
A. fowleri – A beautiful, mysterious, and rare Hispaniolan montane anole. Finding one of these for the first time about a decade ago was a personal triumph.
A. landestoyi – I had wanted to describe a new species since I was a kid. I had the opportunity to do that with this species, which my good friend Miguel Landestoy discovered in the Bahoruco mountains in the western Dominican Republic. What makes this anole particularly interesting is that, despite being discovered in the 21st century on a relatively well-studied Caribbean island, it is totally unlike any other Hispaniolan anole. Instead, it’s very similar to Cuban anoles in the Chamaeleolis clade, and this similarity may represent yet another example of among-island convergence for Greater Antillean anoles.
A. reconditus – Another poorly-known montane endemic, this time from Jamaica. They’re quite colorful, and males are big! I was able to observe several deep in elfin montane forest in the Blue Mountains in 2018, and I was impressed by how bold and inquisitive they were (one traversed several tree trunks to dewlap at me from close range).
A. purpuronectes – A recently described species from Mexico. This is a strikingly beautiful semi-aquatic anole from Oaxaca and Veracruz. I was along on the trip led by Levi Gray and Steve Poe where this species was first recognized as new.
A. distichus – Most of my favorite anoles are either rare or are unique for some reason. But I also have come to appreciate the more common anoles, and distichus is among the commonest you’ll ever find. In recent fieldwork with my lab I’ve come to appreciate the resilience of this species – I’ve always thought of it as thriving in forest edges and other disturbed habitats, but unlike many such species, it’s even more abundant in the forest interior.
A. gorgonae – An entirely cobalt blue anole (dorsally, anyway) found only on the Colombian island of Gorgona. Enough said.
A. proboscis – A twig-ecomorph-like Ecuadorian anole with a scaly sword sticking out of its face!
A. alvarezdeltoroi – This is what you get when you try to make a spider from an anole. It’s a cave-dweller from Mexico and it has an absolutely stunning red dewlap.
A. eugenegrahami – An all-black semi-aquatic anole found only near the town of Plaisance in northern Haiti. Perhaps the most poorly studied of the semi-aquatic anoles, and certainly the most endangered.
A. sheplani – A tiny Hispaniolan twig anole with extremely short limbs. I love twig anoles.
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
I study how anoles are adapting to urban areas. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Losos lab at Washington University. My doctoral research focused on lizards in Puerto Rico but I study anoles throughout the Caribbean.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
I study how anoles are adapting to urbanization. In other words, how their ecology, morphology, and physiology differs in human-dominated habitats like cities. I have found that lizards in urban habitats use microhabitat that is very different from forest habitats, such as buildings and fences, which differ in structural, surface, and microclimate properties. But I have also found that not all species found in urban habitats exploit the urban habitat to the same extent – some still rely on natural elements such as trees or are only found in parks and not on buildings. One species in particular, the Puerto Rican Crested Anole (Anolis cristatellus) exploits urban habitat extensively in its native range. I found that this shift in habitat use is correlated with a shift in morphology: urban lizards across the island of Puerto Rico have relatively longer limbs, larger toepads, more subdigital lamellae compared to their nearby forest counterparts. Based on performance tests and our understanding of the function of these traits, the longer limbs are likely very important for sprinting across the open urban habitat and perching on broad surfaces (like buildings) while the shifts in toepad morphology help improve grip on smooth urban surfaces (like painted walls and metal fences).
How and why did you start studying anoles?
I started studying anoles when I started my PhD research. During my Master’s research I studied turtles in urban areas from an ecological perspective. I was surprised at the extent to which wildlife persists in urban habitats, and how healthy the individuals and populations appeared to be. I knew I wanted to study how urban reptiles were adapting but also knew turtles were not ideal for that type of research. I needed a species that had an evolutionary history of adapting to different habitats and even better if there was evidence of contemporary adaptation to different habitats. Anoles fit that description. Add to that the wealth of literature on their ecology, morphology, and physiology and they were the perfect study group for my interests. I caught my first anole in 2011 and was instantly enamored with them.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
I love that there are seemingly limitless possibilities of what you can study! They are also really fun to catch.
What is your favorite anole species?
I guess I’m partial to the species I studied for most of my dissertation: Anolis cristatellus. They’re abundant in urban areas, and even though they don’t have the flashy colors of some of the other anole species, A. cristatellus are pretty charismatic.
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
I work at the National Museum of Natural History, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC (on the National Mall). My official title is Research Zoologist, but my unofficial title is Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles. Those two titles reflect the two main components of my job, which are to conduct scientific research on amphibians and reptiles and to oversee the collections of amphibians and reptiles in the National Museum. On the research side, my studies focus primarily on the systematics and evolutionary biology of lizards (including anoles, and snakes) and the theory (methods and concepts) of systematic biology.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
In keeping with my general research interests and job description, I study the systematic biology of anoles—that is, the boundaries and numbers of species and the common ancestry relationships of species. The results of those fundamental studies provide the foundation for studying various other aspects of anole evolutionary biology, and the ones that I’ve been most involved in studying relate to diversification, adaptation, and adaptive radiation. I’ve learned a lot of things about anoles over the years, but perhaps the thing that made the biggest impression on me was how old they are. I was surprised that the first fossil anole that I studied was difficult to distinguish from members of some of the living anole species despite having lived ca. 20 million years ago.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
Ironically, I avoided studying anoles early in my career. My first two herpetology mentors, George Gorman and Richard Etheridge, were both major contributors to mid-twentieth-century anole biology, but they had reached contradictory conclusions about the evolutionary relationships of some anole species. I didn’t want to end up having to disagree with either of them, so I chose to work on iguanas and phrynosomatines at the time. On the other hand, I had worked with anoles in the field as an assistant to Gorman, and I had also learned a fair bit about anoles through exposure to the work of my mentors, so I couldn’t help developing an interest in anoles. By the time I was finishing graduate school, Gorman had changed careers and Etheridge had retired and shifted his focus to Liolaemus lizards, so there was less reason to avoid anoles. I had also become friends with Jonathan Losos and had encouraged him to do research on anoles for his Ph.D. (he had been considering working on Varanus or Crotaphytus instead). Jonathan’s interests and mine were complementary, and so we started a long and productive collaboration. However, my first publication on anoles was a perspective on anole taxonomy written with David Cannatella in response to what we considered unnecessary changes in anole taxonomy.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
What appeals to me about anoles is their diversity combined with their uniformity—anoles are a most wonderful example of variations on a theme. This concept is something that appeals to me more generally. For example, some of my favorite museum exhibits are those that display the members of different species within a clade, such as pigs or apes. (If you’re like me in this regard, and especially if you’re fascinated by skeletons (as I am), a must-see is the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, which is basically an enormous room crammed with such displays, including even giant whales.) I have a poster in my house illustrating members of different native North American trout species even though I don’t have a particular interest in trout or trout fishing. In the case of anoles, there are hundreds of species, all with the same basic body plan, yet each one is different in one way or another. I never get tired of seeing anoles, and it’s always a thrill to see a species that I haven’t seen before.
What is your favorite anole species?
Because one of the main things that I love about anoles is their diversity, it’s really hard to pick a favorite species. On the other hand, I tend to be particularly fond of those that are distinctive and/or strange in the context of the clade as a whole. The giant twig anoles in the Chamaeleolis clade are among my favorites, especially Anolis guamuhaya, the species that includes the largest anole I’ve ever seen. At the other end of the spectrum, I’m fascinated by Anolis vanidicus, a species made up of tiny Cuban grass anoles that have very thin arms and legs and remind me of insects. Then there are the colorful, long-legged, rock-climbing Bartsch’s anoles (Anolis bartschi), and the proboscis anoles (Anolis proboscis) with their fleshy snout appendages, and the various species of aquatic anoles … Sorry, I still can’t pick a single favorite.
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
I’m a professor of biology at Washington University in Saint Louis. I teach courses on evolution and biodiversity, and I am in charge of a new biodiversity center that is a collaboration between Wash. U., the Saint Louis Zoo, and the Missouri Botanical Garden.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
I’ve studied anoles for 32 years. In that time, I’ve studied their habitat use, biomechanics, behavior, evolutionary relationships, and many other aspects of their biological diversity. Probably the two key findings from my work—done in collaboration with many students, postdoctoral fellows and colleagues—are that the same set of habitat specialists (a.k.a., “ecomorphs”) have evolved independently on the four islands of the Caribbean in the Greater Antilleans (confirming ideas first put forward by Ernest Williams and Stan Rand) and that anoles adapt rapidly enough that evolution experiments can be conducted in nature, and evolutionary change observed over a small number of years.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
I did science projects on anoles in 8th and 12th grades, but it wasn’t until college, when I had the privilege of working with Ernest Williams and Greg Mayer at Harvard, that I learned about them in a serious way. Then, in graduate school, I went through many failed projects before re-discovering anoles on a summer field course offered by the Organization of Tropical Studies in Costa Rica. I’ve worked on anoles ever since.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
Not only are they fascinating creatures, but they can be studied in many different ways, allowing a wide variety of approaches to be taken to understand how they live their lives and how they’ve evolved.
What is your favorite anole species?
How can I pick just one? Species-for-species, the Jamaican radiation of anoles is the most fabulous, but there are many fabulous species: Anolis vermiculatus comes to mind, the Chamaeleolis clade. There are too many excellent anoles to choose just one…or 10!
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
I’m a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Rhode Island. I teach classes in ecology, evolution and global change biology and conduct research on anoles with my students and postdocs. We study the evolutionary ecology of invasive species and urbanization, primarily in Miami, and the eco-evolutionary dynamics of anoles on small islands in the Bahamas. We combine lab and field work to answer questions about how anoles respond to the rapid environmental change caused by humans.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
I’m an evolutionary ecologist, which means my research spans a wide range of topics including behavior, ecology, evolution, genetics, morphology, and physiology. I’m fundamentally interested in how organisms respond to rapid changes in their environments and humans are often the cause of rapid environmental change, such as climate change, species invasions, and urbanization. Over twenty species of anoles have been introduced to places outside of their native ranges and a common theme for these invasions is that they originate from multiple locations in the native ranges of each species. Once introduced to a new area, anoles from different places in their native range interbreed to produce highly variable populations in non-native areas. Anoles readily evolve during these invasions, producing morphologies and physiological tolerances that differ from native-range populations. Another dimension of global change is urbanization and anoles respond in a variety of ways to city life. We have found that anoles living in cities change how they escape from predators, how they forage, where they perch and how they thermoregulate because of the urban heat island effect.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
I started working on anoles during my Ph.D. when I joined Jonathan Losos’ lab at Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 and I met an energetic and vibrant group of people passionate about ecology, evolution and anoles! I was dead-set on studying the quantitative genetics of anoles; I wanted to study the genetic basis of morphological traits and how natural selection works to shape the morphological variation we see in anoles. Like most fledgling dissertation plans…my plan changed after a few years. In my case, it was because of an exciting opportunity to visit Cuba and sample brown anole populations throughout the island. I then learned that this same species was introduced to Florida, Hawaii, Grand Cayman and many other places and I was hooked on figuring out the history of the invasion where did introduced population come from in the native range and how many times have they been introduced? I sequenced lots of DNA to use as markers of the geographic sources in the native range and I applied these same techniques to several other species of anoles introduced to Florida from the islands of the Greater Antilles – Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. The DNA sequences worked like an identification card to reveal the native-range origin of lizards sampled in introduced populations.
What do you love most about studying anoles?
I like working with great colleagues and students on challenging research questions, traveling to interesting locations in the Caribbean and south Florida, feeling like I can answer any question in ecology and evolution with anoles, and last but not least, I love catching lizards!
What is your favorite anole species?
I’m not sure I could pick just one. I love Anolis allisoni with its beautiful purple, blue and green coloration, but Anolis equestris, a crown giant, is so impressive with its large size and powerful jaws. I will always remember witnessing this species come out of nowhere running down a large trunk to chomp a poor little unsuspecting brown anole for lunch. But I have the most respect for the brown anole, Anolis sagrei, this species can live almost anywhere from tiny little islands in the Bahamas to the urban core of Miami. That’s one tough lizard!
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
The best place to learn more about my research is at our lab website – Kolbe Lab. We regularly update the lab news, personnel profiles and the scientific publications page.
I am an Assistant Professor in Biology at Rutgers University—Camden studying the evolutionary genomics of anoles. Before that I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University in the laboratory of Jonathan Losos. I started working on anoles during my PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Rochester. My research combines a variety of evolutionary disciplines including population genomics, phylogenetics, and experimental animal crosses to ask questions about how new species arise.
What aspects of anole biology do you study, and what have you learned?
I study speciation, which is the process that leads one species to become two or more distinct species. I am interested in what evolutionary forces drive this process. One thing we have learned about speciation in anoles is that populations that are very similar by most measures can still show signs of speciation in progress.
How and why did you start studying anoles?
I have studied a lot of different organisms in my career – including fruit flies, fish, and freshwater mussels. I have even contributed to a paper on naked mole rats! While these studies have been great fun to work on, I have always loved lizards. My very first research project involved documenting the reptiles in a newly formed Florida State Park. Since then, lizards have always been a consistent theme in my work, even as I have branched out into other groups. As I became interested in studying the process of speciation, anoles seemed like an obvious choice. There are over 400 species of anoles, so they are clearly very good at speciation!
What do you love most about studying anoles?
Anoles are unique in that they straddle the divide between model and non-model organisms. Many of the most important discoveries made in evolutionary genetics have come from so-called model organisms like fruit flies, mice, and yeast. While we have made great strides in understanding the genetics and genomics of these species, our knowledge of their biology in nature is relatively limited. In contrast, decades of research on anoles, performed by countless scientists, has generated a tremendous amount of knowledge concerning the ecology and natural history of these lizards. In the last 15 years, we have added genomics to our anole research toolkit to the point where anoles are just a few steps behind model organisms in terms of the genetic tools available. I believe working on anoles now is as exciting as it has ever been as we now have the ability to combine these two bodies of knowledge to better understand how new species of anole arise.
What is your favorite anole species?
That’s a really difficult question. I’ve dedicated many years to studying Anolis distichus and Anolis sagrei and both are fascinating, charismatic species. Rather than pick between the two species I am closest to, I am going to stray outside of the species I have studied and say my favorite is Anolis conspersus. This species is hands down the prettiest lizard I have ever seen in person. In 2016, I had the opportunity to see the species up close in the only place it occurs naturally, the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman. I spent hours watching and photographing them and every time I thought I had seen the most striking body and dewlap coloration, the next would blow me away. While I haven’t had the occasion to do any research on Anolis conspersus, I hope to study them someday and pay these stunning lizards another visit.
Where can people learn more about you and follow you online?
