This brings up a bigger question: why isn’t there a spokesanole for any major company?
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 110 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.
Martha Muñoz’s photo of developing Anolis longitibialis embryos were selected as a “Short Sharp Science” feature. Congratulations, Martha!
Reproductive cycle of Anolis trinitatis, from Licht and Gorman (1970).
All anoles lay only a single egg at a time, but that doesn’t mean that no variation exists among species in reproductive cycles. Still the most comprehensive study of this topic is Licht and Gorman’s (1970) comparison of nine populations of seven species throughout the Caribbean (downloadable as part of AA’s “Classics in Anole Literature” Initiative—pdf contributions welcome!). They found that reproductive activity was most constant through the year in the two southernmost species examined, A. trinitatis and A. griseus from St. Vincent. In the remaining species, both sexes showed some degree of seasonal fluctuations, although reproductive activity by at least some individuals occurred in almost all months. The authors considered rainfall to be the primary factor driving variation in reproductive activity, although in a later paper, they reconsidered and suggested that seasonal temperature cycles were probably more important.
Despite the ease with which such data could be collected, relatively few studies in the past four decades have followed up on this work. One such study on a Colombian anole was featured in AA recently, but for the most part, little work of this sort has been conducted in recent years. Who knows what surprises await an anole comparative reproductive biologist?
Recently AA asked George Gorman for some thoughts on this work, and he provided the summary below of the several papers he and Paul Licht wrote in the first half of the 1970’s on anole reproductive cycles:
Licht and Gorman. 1970. University of California Publications in Zoology 95:1-52.
Geographic range of natural and introduced populations of Anolis sagrei. From Angetter et al. (2011).
The Cuban brown anole, Anolis sagrei, is indisputably the most successful of all Caribbean anoles. Not only is it found throughout almost all of Cuba at low elevations, but also everywhere in the Bahamas, on many islands in western Cuba, and even on the coast of Central America. Not surprisingly given its natural colonizing ability, the brown anole is the anole most widely introduced by humans as well, now established not only in Florida, but also on many islands in the Caribbean, as well as Taiwan, Hawaii and, most recently, Costa Rica.
What is surprising is how widely the brown anole has spread in North America. As the map above indicates, invasive populations have moved to areas much farther north than the species’ most northerly outpost in the Bahamas. One would think that Cuban anoles—or even Bahamian ones—would not be adapted to conditions in Georgia because environmental conditions are so different from those in Cuba.
To examine this idea, Angetter et al. conducted a species distribution modeling exercise to compare the environmental conditions that characterize the brown anole’s native range with that of its introduced range.
And here’ s more information on these classic prints. The webpage of the NYPL Digital Gallery proclaims that it “is The New York Public Library’s image database, developed to provide free and open online access to hundreds of thousands of images from the original and rare holdings of The Library. Spanning a wide range of historical eras, geography, and visual media, NYPL Digital Gallery offers digital images of drawings, illuminated manuscripts, maps, photographs, posters, prints, rare illustrated books, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of The Library, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences.”
Most importantly, of course, these holdings include classic paintings of anoles, including those by Catesby and others. For example, searching using the term “Anolis” yields 12 paintings, including those of A. carolinensis, A. cuvieri, A. sagrei and others. Be forewarned that they are categorized by the name used in their original source. Holbrook’s drawings from North American Herpetology were just added (thanks to CNAH for bringing this to AA’s attention), but our beloved North American green is categorized as Anolius carolinensis.
And for those of you who’ve already begun your holiday shopping, prints of these images are available at a reasonable cost.
Caption: "Flora and fauna abound."
The Travel section of the NYT recently featured Caribbean getaways and, of course, anoles were a criteria for choosing which destinations to feature. This isn’t a tough one, but can anyone identify this agave-loving anole?
In response to recent discussion of dead-playing anoles, AA‘s French connection Ludovic recently brought to our attention a video of an A. coelestinus doing the same, while floating in a sink.
And as an extra treat, Youtube then directed the alert viewer to a bonus track of what appears to be a fuzzy A. stratulus going to town on a slice of watermelon.
Anole in amber--but how old?
The fossil record of anoles is disappointingly small. Other than very young (a few thousand years old) fossils found in caves, where owls and other predators may have left them, only four full-fledged fossils are known from the scientific literature. All are lizards preserved in amber, approximately 20 million years old (give or take a few million). Here’s a picture of one here.
But there are a lot more in private hands. The problem, however, is Jurassic Park. Remember how the mad scientists got their dinosaur DNA? They extracted it from mosquitoes entombed in amber. And where did the amber come from? Perhaps you recall the scene of the lawyer (later justifiably devoured by T. rex) getting off a river raft to purchase some amber. Where? The Dominican Republic. And it turns out that those amber mines do exist, only their deposits date to the Miocene, not the Cretaceous. And, more importantly, as well as skeeters and other invertebrates, occasionally an anole-laden piece of amber emerges from these mines.
Ken Miyata photographed these anoles about 30 years ago. All we know is that they are from Colombia. Can anyone help?
For an interesting discussion of how the anole genome informs about human genetics, and discussion of a creationist’s claim that the anole genome can’t tell us anything about evolution, check out the latest post in Anolis Tollis.