Reader Mona G writes: “I like to watch anoles in my garden in the Florida Keys where they are ubiquitous. I also take photos of them. I wanted to tell a funny story about one of my photo shoots. This took place a few years before digital cameras were invented. The days of using film! I had a very large, long and heavy zoom lens. It was summertime and very hot. I sat in one spot observing a large anole doing what they do when another anole comes into their territory. He used his dewlap often and the sunlight was lighting it up making it so beautiful. It appeared to be all shades of red,yellow, orange and hot pink. It is not easy to catch that dewlap moment. So I sat sweating profusely and eventually aching from being tensed up into certain postures to get certain angles. I was so excited about the photos I was sure I would have at least 3 or 4 perfect pix out of my roll of 36. I prepared to take them directly to be processed. As I started to rewind the film back into it’s canister… something didn’t feel right. I thought “oh no. The film has gone too far and has detached from the can.” NO that was not the problem..the problem was that there was NO FILM in my %&^^&*&^%#!!! camera…I LOVE DIGITAL!! Anyone have any stories like this to share? Also about this chameleon pix..is this a pet? Or is it in nature? I hope someone enjoyed my story. I STILL take anole pix very often. They are always interesting to observe. I often leave a banana peel on a table and they come to eat the fruit flies. They seem to be familiar with me. Not tame but more relaxed in my presence as time goes by. I have also become familiar with certain lizards who live in a certain area. They definitely have there own home turf. Thanks for reading. I am attaching a recent night shot. This anole sleeps in the same area every night. I woke him up and you can see he is not very happy about it!
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 103 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.
Green anole recently captured on Grand Cayman
This fella was caught a week and a half ago near North Side fire station, Grand Cayman. It’s the first green anole found outside the capital, Georgetown. The question: what is it? Anolis carolinensis? Anolis porcatus? Something else?
In fact, I frequently get asked whether a particular green anole is carolinensis or porcatus. Some people say they can tell them apart. I’m not so sure.
Fighting carolinensis. Photo from https://twitter.com/#!/tsansmerci/status/183640654881095681/photo/1
Wowie zowie! Check that out. The top carolinensis is holding the other one in mid-air by its jaws. No wonder they have such big heads (female carolinensis heads are much smaller) and such powerful toepads.
Previously we reported on the efforts to raise money to produce a book on endangered lacertid lizards. The fund-raising is going well, thanks to many AA readers and others. Here’s the latest:
First of all, THANK YOU to all of our backers! The big news is that we reached our Kickstarter goal yesterday, and that means one thing: We’re going to Spain!
We couldn’t have done it without every one of you. By the end of yesterday, our 199 backers had pledged a total of $15,268 — an average pledge of over $76. We’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of our friends, family, and lots of folks we’ve never even met before!
Now that we’ve reached our “do or die” goal, we get to put all the money we’ve raised into our book, The Symbol: Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make this project even better! We’ve still got 10 days left before our Kickstarter campaign is over. The initial $15,000 we’ve raised will get us to Ibiza and Formentera for 1 month of photography, allow us to lay out the book, and help us print a small initial press run for sale on the islands.
So what’s next?
We’re photographers, and that means we love to see our pictures printed — that’s why we first envisioned this project as a book! But we also realize that the world of reading is changing, and not everyone wants to carry a book around with them. So we want to develop The Symbol into an iPad app available in Apple’s App Store. Along with the basic book, we will add slideshows and short videos into this “app-book,” creating a true multimedia experience.
Building the app will cost us about another $5000. With 10 days to go, we think we can make this happen! Here’s what we can do to make it worth your while:
1) When we reach $17,500: For new and existing backers at the $25 level or above (and existing backers who increase their pledge to $25 or more), we’ll give you a beautiful PDF edition of The Symbol to read on any computer or mobile device. We’ll also make the PDF edition of the book freely availableto Ibiza and Formentera’s primary schools.
2) When we reach $20,000: We will develop the iPad edition of The Symbol: Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago — an interactive e-book enhanced with additional images and video clips. We will also donate a hard copy of The Symbol to every primary school on Ibiza and Formentera.
So what can you do?
If you’re a backer who has pledged less than $25, increase your pledge to $25 or more to get the PDF edition of The Symbol when we reach $17,500! And help us get the word out! I know every one of our backers has a few friends who would love to support this project. Use email and social media to share the link to our campaign. Tell your friends that you made a pledge, and that they should too!
Thanks again for your incredible generosity! Once our expedition begins, we’ll be posting images and videos from the field regularly. Expect these e-updates to begin when we leave for Spain in mid-June. We’ll see you then!
All the best,
Neil Losin, Nate Dappen, and Valentin Perez-Mellado
Otocryptis wiegmanni. Photo by Akila De Silva from http://lazy-lizard-tales.blogspot.com/2012/01/year-of-dragon-amazing-agamids.html
A while back we had a post discussing the many times lizards have evolved dewlaps, and more recently our mystery lizard was a most anole-like agamid lizard, Sitana ponceriana. Above is a close relative of Sitana, Otocryptis wiegmanni, doing its best anole imitation. Really, someone needs to do a comparative anatomical study of all these dewlaps to see how similar they are in construction–I’m guessing pretty similar!
The photo comes from a cool website, The Lazy Lizard’s Tales, and this particular post is chockful of cool looking agamids
Brown anole from Dust Tracks on the Web
Darwin famously pointed out that a surfeit of cats could lead to an abundance of flowers. Janson Jones has transplanted that way of thinking to our favorite study organism, arguing that a population burst in green anoles in Florida is due to an influx of little dogs, whose ceaseless yapping and running amok has knocked brown anoles off their game, allowing the greens to proliferate. Read all about it here.
Animals and/or insects have a very weird yet amazing relationship with each other. Most of the time, a species will be wiped out without the other. When we think of our dogs, we often think about getting them the best life they can have, and we end up buying stuff from www.treehousepuppies.com or from our local pet shops. But nature does not operate that way, instead, it lets the animals and insects fend for themselves with the help of others.
And here’s what Darwin had to say:
Humble bees alone visit red clover, as other bees cannot reach the nectar. It has been suggested that moths may fertilise the clovers; but I doubt whether they could do so in the case of the red clover, from their weight not being sufficient to depress the wing petals.
Hence we may infer as highly probable that, if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great measure upon the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Colonel Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that “more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England.”
Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Colonel Newman says, “Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.” Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!
The fabled gray dewlapped anole. Photo by Harry Greene
Harry Greene and Jed Sparks lead a two week graduate field trip to Florida. While there, they espied the lizard shown above in the Corkscrew Swamp near Naples, FL. Here’s what Harry had to say: “Jed Sparks, the other instructor, initially said “green” after I’d told him to expect pink, and that was the first of the two we saw–I got only a glimpse of the partly protracted dewlap and no photos of that one. Second animal I got 3-4 images of separate dewlap expansions, and can say that through binos they looked pale green, but when I look at the images I see white scales and gray or green interscalar skin, not sure which! In any case, I can tell you almost exactly where I saw each of them, and they were on the same first half stretch of the ~2 mi boardwalk, in each case in well lit sites on the outer edge of swamp proper.”
Note that Macedonia in his 2003 paper referred to the dewlaps of these species as “greenish-gray.” Gray-dewlapped green anoles are known from southwestern Florida, but have been little studied. The seminal work is Macedonia’s aforementioned study, that concludes:
asks reader Esteban Dominguez Vargas, who posted the photo on his Flickr page. For more on A. anoriensis, read here.
Photo by Janson Jones
We’ve previously discussed how green anoles, Anolis carolinensis, are much more terrestrial in areas where A. sagrei doesn’t occur. Janson Jones, who has written on this previously, now adds a new twist–at one sagrei-less site in Georgia, they’re frolicking around in the water lilies and other aquatic vegetation. Read all about it here.
That got me thinking. Maybe this is how the famed “aquatic” anoles evolve? First you hang out on weeds in the water, next you’re jumping in for a dip?
And speaking of anoles, not only do they float, but they can swim, even those that rarely, if ever, enter the water. I’ve inadvertantly put A. sagrei into the ocean a number of times (think lizard noosing malfunction), and they just press their legs against their body and swim by undulating their tail, alligator-style. Green anoles do that, too, and I’ll bet all anoles innately can swim. I wonder what would happen if you put a crown giant in water. Anyone want to try that with their pet in the bathtub? I bet they can swim, too. So, anoles are pre-adapted (exapted, if you will) for becoming adding aquatic habitats to their repertoire.
And that leads me to one more thought in this ramble: Carl Gans published an obscure paper (Locomotor responses of Calotes to water (Agamidae: Sauria). J. Bombay Natural History Society, vol. 74:361-363, 1977) years ago about some Asian agamid lizards (Calotes) that he dropped into a swimming pool. At first they swam as described above, but then started flailing their legs ineffectually. Eventually, their head would drop below the water, they would breathe in some water, sink to the bottom and then start walking around, presumably until they would have drowned if not rescued. Doesn’t seem like they have much of a future in adapting to aquatic habitats. Similarly, if you dunk a baby duck under water (not that I’ve ever done that), they hold their breath, but baby chickens try to breathe, and things don’t go well. Take home lesson: basic motor patterns and behaviors are needed if a species is to have any hope of adapting to a new habitat. If it doesn’t have the necessary prerequisites to survive there, they have no chance of adapting. (This is, more or less, the theme of another Gans paper I stumbled across when looking for the one mentioned above).
Shedding green anole is the Photo of the Day at National Geographic.