This one can be purchased from Zazzle, and if you go to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a variety of other fridge magnets. Who knew there was such variety?
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 100 of 130
Professor of Biology and Director of the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in Saint Louis. I've spent my entire professional career studying anoles and have discovered that the more I learn about anoles, the more I realize I don't know.
Into every life, a little rain must fall…but sometimes not enough. Our Bahamian brown anoles are delicate little flowers. Too cold and rainy, and they don’t come out. But too hot and dry, they also hunker down. Too windy–nap time. Like the three bears (or was it the little blonde girl?), it has to be just right.
And that put us in a bind. As our trip to the Bahamas wound down, we were running out of time, and as we got to our boat launch site, the weather didn’t look good.
Storm a-comin'
Waiting for the storm? Or Godot?
All we could do is wait for the storm to arrive. No point going out–it was too cold for the lizards to be active. And finally, the storm arrived, and we took cover in the only shelter available.
The relatively sparse anole holdings of the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates.
I recently asked which museums have the largest holdings of anoles. I’ll now ask the obvious next question: which species are most represented in these museum holdings? Shouldn’t be much of a surprise: the first five species I checked were, indeed, the top five. But I’ll give one hint: the top five in Al Schwartz’s collection at the University of Kansas are not the top five overall.
So, who can name the top five, and in the correct order? And a bonus question: which species is number six?
Lizard Motion Detection Gizmo. Read all about it at http://chipojolab.blogspot.com/2012/05/motion-detection.html
We all know that anoles have a keen sense of vision. But how much does an insect have to move to draw a lizard’s attention? And do species vary in their sensory abilities? Dave Steinberg of Duke University is in Puerto Rico, trying to find out.
Anolis smaragdinus
Picture this: I’m walking back to my room in Marsh Harbour, Abaco, Bahamas and as I approach the building, a green anole (A. smaragdinus) that was on the side of the fence enclosing the air conditioner (marked x) runs down the fence to the sidewalk, then hightails it on the sidewalk–legs cycling furiously–running straight towards me. It gets to the palm tree just before I do, then dashes furiously up to the top of the palm tree. What a sight! I could read it in his eyes–“gotta’ get to that tree before that big lunkhead does. Gotta’ run, fast, fast fast.” Didn’t anyone tell him he’s not terrestrial? Couldn’t he have just run up the building wall?
The escape route
Martha Munoz hard at work in the lab of George Bakken at Indiana State University
Martha Muñoz recently posted on the development of methods to study lizard ecophysiology and her visit to Indiana State University to visit the lab of Dr. George Bakken to make copper lizard models. Turns out that Martha is now a celebrity in Terre Haute, and the ISU Newsroom has just written a very nice article about Martha, George, and anoles.
Bora Zivkovic, Blog Editor at Scientific American, has named Anole Annals “Blog of the Week.” Congratulations to us! Here’s what the very perceptive Zivkovic had to say on his site, A Blog Around the Clock:
“For the greatest portion of the history of biology, every organism was a “model organism.” One would pick a problem and then choose which organism would be most suited for answering those particular questions. Then, in the 1990s, everyone jumped onto the bandwagon of studying just a handful of organisms that could be genetically modified at the time: mouse, fruitfly, thale cress, zebrafish, African clawed frog, bread mold, brewer’s yeast, or E. coli. All the other organisms were all but abandoned, only studied by a small number of die-hard researchers and, increasingly, amateurs. Now that technology allows us to investigate (and to some extent manipulate) entire genomes of almost any species we’d like, researchers are going back and rediscovering the abandoned model organisms once again. One of these is Anolis, a large group of species of lizards, noted for their dewlaps, and known especially for their fast adaptive radiation on tropical islands.
And now there is a blog that covers everything about these lizards – Anole Annals. Posts are written both by veteran researchers and their students, from several laboratories, as well as other contributors. They cover both recent and historical papers on evolution, ecology, biogeography, behavior, physiology, biomechanics and genetics of this diverse group of reptiles. They also describe their own research, including anecdotes and adventures from field work, equipment they use in the lab, and successes in discovery. On top of that, they help people ID the species from pictures, pay attention to the appearance of anoles in art and in the popular culture and generally have a lot of fun doing all of this. A blog entirely devoted to just one group of animals sounds very ‘niche,’ but what they did was build a blog that has something for everyone and is a great fun (as well as insightful and educational) read for everyone.”
AA previously has had posts on the new project in Puerto Rico to examine the effect of global warming on anoles and other critters. Now the project has a spiffy new website, well worth a look.
Luisa Otero, a team member on the project, gives us the backstory:
“Almost a year ago I started working as a Research Assistant in a Project titled “Vulnerability of Tropical Ectotherms to Climate Warming.” Until then, I had been planning to do my master’s degree studying sex determination within nests of hawksbill sea turtles here in Puerto Rico. However, after spending almost a whole month during the summer in the field working with Dr. George Gorman, Prof. Raymond Huey, Prof. Bradford Lister, and Prof. Paul Hertz, I began to question my research interests…. And what can I say? I just fell for lizards!
The main aim of the lizard project is to evaluate whether climate warming here in Puerto Rico during the last decades has caused changes in the thermal biology, reproduction cycles, and ecological interactions of anoles. The approach involves comparing contemporary field patterns with those collected during the 70’s and 80’s by the investigators mentioned above.
A couple of weeks ago we published a website with information about the project, and now we would like to share it with you all. We will use this website to share our findings as well as those of related studies of tropical organisms.”
What is this odd-looking fellow?
A friend of mine wanted to know what anole species this was invading the southeastern U.S., and whether it was a threat to the green anole, Anolis carolinensis. Of course, it is nothing more than a large green anole, but it shows how transformed they are when they become agitated. The enlarged dorsal crest on the neck–bright green–and the black spot behind the eye–classic signs of a male engaged in an aggressive confrontation. Understandable how someone could have mistaken it for a different species.
Having four legs is overrated
A year ago, I reported on the surprisingly high incidence of limb loss in brown anoles from Staniel Cay, Bahamas. By the end of that trip, we found five lizards missing a part of their limb, usually the forelimb (see pictures in the previous post) out of 500 we examined (1%). We attributed this limb devastation to predators, but didn’t know what the cause was.
This year in Abaco, we’ve examined close to 400 lizards now, and have only found one case of leg loss. However, it’s an interesting one: most of a hindleg is gone. Yet, the lizard lives–the wound is healed over, so this lizard seems to be doing just fine.