It is very clear that most people who have posted to the blog site are quite uncomfortable with any proposed change to the concept of one big happy Anolis. What shines through to me in the posts is how deeply emotional the thought of this change is for many of us. I think I understand this emotion and hope to try to persuade you to let go of it by presenting this short story. I did my dissertation on Norops humilis in Costa Rica. The emotional side of me likes to think that, when this scientific name is mentioned in the future, my name and my work will forever be associated with it. Because of that, when Gunther Köhler and Kirsten Nicholson (my very own former student!!!!) wrote a paper demonstrating that I had not performed a dissertation on N. humilis but instead had worked with N. quaggulus, I took the news quite badly. In fact, to this day I struggle with this news because I find it difficult to deal with an emotion that says my work will be lost to the scientific community because of this name change. Obviously, this is totally illogical. The scientific community has been quite resilient to such changes. Classic works on North American Natrix were not lost to careful scientists by a name change to Nerodia. Blair’s work on North American Bufo will continue to be found and cited by anyone working with evolution of Anaxyrus. In the case of my N. humilis work, the thing that has gotten me over the emotional hump is the exciting biology that becomes clear if N. humilis and N. quaggulus are distinct species. Jenn Deitloff, Kirsten Nicholson, and I have been looking for the contact zone between the species I studied at La Selva and the species in Costa Rica that I thought I was studying. We want to determine how two species can maintain separate evolutionary trajectories given that there is no obvious boundary to their dispersal and their dewlaps, at least to my eye, are virtually identical. Köhler’s work seems to indicate that anole biologists have vastly undercounted the real species richness within Norops (and probably the other genera) because some characters, like dewlap color, may operate on a much more subtle level than we have allowed ourselves to consider. If I could have forced the world to succumb to my emotions, I would have, and these anoles would still be one big happy species rather than the several smaller lineages that character data seem to indicate they are. I could cling to N. humilis by pointing to a node on the tree and argue that, because of taxonomic stability, this should continue to be that species so that my La Selva work would maintain its association with that taxon. But, I would miss out on the interesting biology that emerges from simply letting go of that concept.
I see similar advantages to breaking anoles into eight genera. My experiences have caused me to develop a completely different search image for anoles in the genus Dactyloa than I have for those in the genus Norops. In helping to generate the revised taxonomy, I think I learned something interesting about anole ecology, and that is that it may be shaped by an origin of the group in the crowns of canopy rainforest trees in South America followed by a series of biogeographic events that brought them down to the leaf litter. I don’t recall our notions of evolution of anole communities being framed in quite this way. The fossil record and the topology of the phylogenetic tree led us to that insight. Discussions among the authors of the revised classification, during which we forced ourselves to use eight generic names instead of one, helped us gain those insights. We encourage the use of our taxonomy because it helped us see things that we might not have seen and we are confident that this may happen to others. As foundational as Schoener’s studies of one- and two-species islands were (and are – this work certainly shaped my interests), we think it would have been improved had he been forced to recognize those anoles as belonging to the genera Dactyloa and Ctenonotus. We suspect he would have analyzed the sets of islands separately and might have generated discussion among ecologists about degrees of freedom in comparative studies a decade before that discussion actually emerged. We think the taxon-loop vs. character-displacement argument would have been refined had the Dactyloa islands been viewed separately from the Ctenonotus islands. The Dactyloa-islands likely would have been described as fitting most strongly with the taxon loop hypothesis (large ancestors forced to become small with the first small species being doomed to extinction by the next smallest species – or large colonists reaching these islands, leading to the same process) and the Ctenonotus islands likely would have been described as most strongly fitting the character displacement hypothesis (mid-sized ancestors with a niche focused toward the ground diverging to make room for the next mid-sized colonists). We think Losos’ analysis of evolution of ecomorphology of Puerto Rican anoles would have been improved had he been forced to use the genera Deiroptyx and Ctenonotus.
I think the real intent of this blog is expressed in Glor’s posts. In my opinion, he is clearly asking the community of anole systematists to band together as a unified voice against acceptance of the proposed new taxonomy. Obviously, the community of anole systematists has never been of one mind on this topic and I would hope that the community would recoil at the thought that we ever should be. The notion that the world recently came to accept a single large genus Anolis as the only viable concept can be rejected by the observation that some in the community of anole systematists continue to publish under names such as Dactyloa, Norops, and Ctenonotus (e.g. Savage’s book). Given what is happening with so many other large, cumbersome genera, I think it is inevitable that a revised classification of anoles will happen and those who are fighting so hard to prevent it will find their careers intact when they cross that inevitable threshold. Once there, I think they will wonder why they fought so hard against change.
KIRSTEN E. NICHOLSON, BRIAN I. CROTHER, CRAIG GUYER & JAY M. SAVAGE (2012). It is time for a new classification of anoles (Squamata: Dactyloidae) Zootaxa, 3477, 1-108