The Anole Annals community was rocked recently by news that Cabela’s 10-foot, collapsible panfish poles–ideal for anole catching–are no longer available. Panic and pandemonium have ensued, but fear not: all may not be lost. In response to a comment I lodged on their website, I received this response: “We do still carry item number 115800. You are welcome to go to our web site cabelas.com and search the item number to see if that is what you are looking for. If not please call our customer service number of 1-800-237-8888 and ask to speak to a products associate who may be able to locate the one we used to carry and help with the manufacturer’s name and number” (I had asked for info to contact the manufacter directly). Melissa Woolley did so and was told that they are listed as backordered and should be available in late April. So, maybe there is still hope. I would like to urge all concerned anolians to go to Cabela’s Customer Service webpage and say something to encourage Cabela’s to restock the panfish pole pronto! https://cabelas.custhelp.com/app/ask
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 106 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.
Knight anole from Grand Bahama. Photo courtesy of Daniel Murray.
A population of Anolis equestris has been reported from the island of Grand Bahamas. Specifically near Our Lucaya, living in a stand of dilly trees.
Only A. sagrei is native to Grand Bahama (which is somewhat remarkable given the size of the island), but equestris is the third introduced anole there, following distichus and a green anole (either carolinensis or smaragdinus, but I’m not sure if it is clear which). Is anyone aware of knight anoles elsewhere in the Bahamas? They seem to be getting around the Caribbean, as they have shown up in New Providence in the Bahamas, as well as Grand Cayman and the Turks and Caicos (see Knapp et al. and Powell et al. chapters in book discussed here). Given their size, they seem an unlikely stow-away, although eggs could be transported in nursery plants. The pet trade has also been implicated as a possibility.
Calling all German-speaking Anole Annals aficionados. Just what the heck does this say? Some Dutch speakers loosely translated this as an announcement of a new art exhibit on sex. Richtig? A German-to-English translation website helpfully translates this as: “Light signals, the correct reputation or Pushups? From a research group from the mountain wildlife shows the state museum of natural history in Stuttgart until May 2012 in the exhibition “sex.” It is also about phenomena such as infidelity or patchwork-families.”
Thanks to Susanne Renner for her eagle eye out for lizards in adverts.
The management here at Anole Annals feels responsible for putting up an appropriate, anole-themed Valentine Day’s post. Unfortunately, our normally reliable stable of incredibly talented and imaginative authors has not come up with the expected image of an anoline cupid, an anole starstruck with love, or some such, so we’re in a bit of a bind. It’s not too late, creative types–there’s still 5 valentine hours left here in North America!
However, in their absence, we thought a little googling would solve the problem. Typing in “anole love” found only one appropriate, G-rated image, and it came from…Anole Annals (below)! So we settled for the intriguing book cover above, which of course leads to the question: has anyone read this provocative romance novel?
read all about it here: https://www.anoleannals.org/2012/01/03/asymmetrical-dewlap-color-in-anolis-lineatus-on-curacao/
They thought it was only a three hour tour.
In my career, I have found that the most exciting research is when the results are exactly the opposite of what I had expected. Certainly, it’s nice to show that what you thought was correct, but you really learn something when the opposite occurs–it makes you look at questions in a new way and often leads to new insights. This has happened to me several times, most recently in our experimental study of founder effects in Bahamian anoles (paper downloadable here).
One of the tiny islands on which the founder effect experiment was conducted. Note the scraggly vegetation. Photo by Jason Kolbe.
Here’s the story: we have been conducting studies on anoles in the Bahamas for quite some time, using tiny islands as experimental test tubes. We had seen island populations wiped out by hurricanes, and we had documented anoles colonizing these islands, so we knew that populations often must be founded by overwater dispersal, probably by one or very few individuals. Given the long-running controversy over the evolutionary significance of founder effects, we had long discussed whether we could create an experimental founder effect, in replicate, to see what would happen. But we never started such an experiment, for a simple reason: suitable islands for our various ecological and evolutionary experiments were in short supply, and this experiment wasn’t a high priority.
Enter Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in short succession in the late summer of 2004.
Read all about what they’re up to here.
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a nice news article covering the recent study on island colonization and adaptation in anoles (pdf now available here). Very quickly, back-and-forth exchanges appeared in the paper’s online comments section, but most of them were debates about evolution vs. creationism/intelligent design, as well as invectives, insults, and ad hominem attacks. The same thing happened when I posted a story on the anole genome and its utility for the study of evolution on a National Geographic news website. Who knew that anole research was so pivotal to the evolution/creationism controversy? Or that it could bring out the worst in so many?
Appended below are the 77 comments that had appeared in the Washington Post by mid-afternoon on Monday.
Your Comments On:
Castaway lizards put evolution to the test
By Brian Vastag, Published: February 4
77
Photo courtesy Paul Richards
Paul Richards and Kirsten Nicholson found this unusual knight anole while conducting their radio-tracking study on this magnificent species. Richards recalls: “I think we found him on the west edge of the “microbiome” of the Gifford Arboretum. I recall showing it to a well known herpetologist who claimed it was a temporary color change, so we held it overnight. It looked identical in the morning and we released it. I honestly can not remember if we bead tagged it or not (that would be stupid but…). We never saw that individual again, but I also cannot recall how far into the study we were, so our regular searches could have ended soon after. Local lizard fanciers have told me they have seen these color morphs before, so it is apparently somewhat common.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAgxpB9fn50
Duke University Press Release. Check out the cool video!
In 2004, Hurricane Francis wiped out all Caribbean lizards found on the keys near the Bahamas.
Seeing an opportunity to study evolution, Duke biologist Manuel Leal and his colleagues took lizards from a larger, nearby island, paired them up and then put the couples on seven of the small keys.
The scientists came back year after year to check on their experiment.
They observed the lizards’ legs getting shorter over time. But, the lizards’ legs did not all shorten to the same size, a hint of the founder effect, where traits from a founding species persist after years of adaptation. It is one of the rare times scientists have seen this phenomenon in nature.
The first results of the experiment were published in a Feb. 2 Science Express article.
You can read more about the study here. And how’s this for a newspaper article title: “Lowly lizards settle ‘founder effect’ theory“?
Citation: “Founder Effects Persist Despite Adaptive Differentiation: A Field Experiment with Lizards.” J.J. Kolbe, J.B. Losos, M. Leal, T.W. Schoener and D.A. Spiller. Science Express. Feb. 2012.
Many arboreal animals get from one place to another by jumping. But there’s a problem: branches, particularly narrow ones, aren’t stiff. As a result, as the animal starts to jump by pushing against the branch, the branch gives way and bends. As a result, some of the force that could be used to push off is dissipated in pushing the branch away. One potential solution would be to avoid bend-y branches; another would to make like an Olympic high diver and wait for the branch to spring back, and then use the recoil to help launch the animal forward. Do animals use any of these tricks? Or is their jumping compromised on pliable surfaces?
Turns out that there hasn’t been much work on this, but the research that has been conducted, on birds and primates, has showed that jumping performance is, indeed, reduced on flexible surfaces and that there is no evidence for animals powering off a branch’s recoil. No work has been conducted on small animals, so Casey Gilman set out to remedy this shortcoming by examining the jump biology of the Florida green anole. You can read here about the background to her study and see some photos of the study site.
The main findings of the study can be summarized easily: 1. In the wild, green anoles frequently use very compliant (bend-y) surfaces such as narrow branches and leaves; 2. In the lab, when anoles jump, they do not use the recoil of the support to increase their jump distance; and 3. The more flexible the support, the great the reduction in jump distance.
The most exciting finding of the study, however, was something completely unexpected. The reason that lizard jumps were short from very flexible supports was not just that the support’s give wasted some of the lizard’s push. Rather, what happened was that as the support recoiled, it smacked into the underside of the tail of the launching lizard. This in turn pushes the back end of the lizard up and the front end down, and instead of sailing through the air with the greatest of ease, the lizard does an ungainly face plant, as the video above illustrates. Apparently, this happened frequently when lizards jump off of very pliant surfaces.
Who knew? It certainly makes sense, but I have to say, I’ve never seen a lizard gobsmacked by a branch as it jumps. Maybe it happens too fast to actually recognize what’s happened, but I don’t recall seeing lizards jump in such a klutzy manner. Has anyone noticed something like this in the wild?
More generally, an obvious next step is to not only measure the pliancy of the perches on which lizards can be found, but to observe their movements and see if they choose to jump from particularly stiff surfaces, relative to the ones they use more generally. Word on the street is that Gilman has already conducted just such a study, with fascinating results. Stay tuned!
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