Author: Jonathan Losos Page 14 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.

New Research Project on Anolis pogus on St. Maarten

This just in from the Daily Herald, the self-proclaimed leading for St. Maarten and the northeastern Caribbean:

Research ongoing on status of endemic Bearded Anole Lizard

 

Bearded anole with a dorsal stripe, dark bands and a turquoise spot around the eyes foraging on St. Maarten. (Joost Merjenburgh photo)

 

COLE BAY–Nature Foundation, in collaboration with Reptile, Amphibian and Fish Conservation Netherlands RAVON, is researching the local status of the bearded anole (Anolis pogus) lizard, also known as the Anguilla Bank bush anole.

  This new research, executed by Aeres University student Joost Merjenburgh, will provide insight into the status of the vulnerable species and hopefully prevent its extinction.The bearded anole is an important endemic species to St. Maarten, which means that the species is native and can only be found here. In the past, the bearded anole occurred on Anguilla and possibly on Saint-Barthélemy, but has vanished on both islands for unknown reasons.

The research is aimed to better understand the current abundance, distribution and habitat preference of the bearded anole, as presently only little data is available. The data will provide insight about the population trend of the species and are needed for its International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red-list re-assessment. With this information measures can be made to conserve and protect the species.

Merjenburgh is investigating a total of 100 80-square-metre location plots each. All bearded anole are counted and measurements are taken of tree canopy cover and habitat type. Until now the bearded anole population seems to be well distributed on the island. The bearded anole seems to be quite abundant when searching in the right habitat and is mostly absent in residential areas.

Bearded anoles have a special appearance which can differ between individuals. Some individuals have a turquoise-coloured spot around the eye, others have a dorsal stripe or dark bands across the neck and body, and some have all characteristics. The reason there is so much difference in pattern and coloration is that they use their appearance for camouflage and communication purposes.

The bearded anole can also use the dewlap, a flap of skin that hangs beneath the lower jaw, to communicate. Although both genders have a dewlap, the one on the female is usually much smaller and less colourful than the one on the male. The male extends his dewlap mainly to attract females during mating season or to confront other males when they enter his territory, explained Merjenburgh.

Their diet, like other anoles, consists mainly of small arthropods – for example, cockroaches, crickets and spiders are their favourite foods – and occasionally flowers and fruits.

This species also falls prey to predators sometimes. One of those predators is the mongoose, which is an introduced species. The mongoose eats every native reptile species on the island and is probably the reason the only native snake, the leeward island racer, has probably become extinct on St. Maarten, said Merjenburgh.

New Book on Lizard Behavior Appears Next Month

Name that cover-gracing anole!

A new book on lizard behavior has an anole gracing the cover (who can guess the species?) and an all-star cast of contributors, including a number familiar to AA faithful (see Table of Contents below). The book is due out in a month, but you can go ahead and pre-order it. Sadly, it’s priced in the stratosphere: $159 for the 400 page volume. Let’s hope for a paperback edition!

AA Greatest Hits: A Highly Anecdotal Account of a Most Remarkable Anole

From the archives. One of the greatest <i>Anole Annals</i> posts of all times, because why not?

“You’ve gotta see this!” my fiancé Mark called to me one morning.  He was outside, which could mean only one thing: a wildlife encounter was underway.  Living in a semi-rural neighborhood in Florida, you never knew what you would see, from a mated pair of Sandhill Cranes walking down the street with their young, to Gopher Tortoises excavating burrows in the front yard.

I walked downstairs to the concrete area under our elevated house where Mark was staring at something on the ground.  I looked down to see a frog (Cuban Treefrog) with the tail of an A. carolinensis protruding from its gullet.

“I knew that lizard,” Mark said forlornly.

Advances in Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology: Essays in Honor of Ernest E. Williams Available Online

I don’t know how long this has been the case, but you can download it, or chapters within it, at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Enormous Growths/Endolymphatic Sacs on the Neck of a Green Anole

Can anyone advise our correspondent in North Carolina who writes about the anole above with enormous growths that may be endolympathic sacs out of control:

Maybe you have some ideas about this growth, which I originally thought were calcium storage seen in anoles, but this just looks like it is going to pop any second.  I bred this girl about 2.5 years ago and she usually lives with my boss unless he goes on vacation, which is when I take care of her.  I also still have her Dad and sister (long story and I’ll never do it again!).  I let the other eight (!) babies that I raised and Mom, who was used to the wild, go.  This girl has always been very hyper and green all the time and has laid a bunch of eggs this past spring and started getting these pockets (thought calcium).  But now the one side is sooo big!  She gets almost the same care as my two (Dad and sister), except maybe a little less sunlight (mine are at a window).  I was worried it is an abscess or parasite or something.  I asked someone at the NCSU vet school and he wasn’t sure.  Oh, she hasn’t been eating well, either, the last few days.

Attached is the photo of her and also a fun one for Christmas that was part of our Christmas card.  We rescued Dad out of a spider web when he was maybe a few days old.  He was dragging his hindlegs, but then regained his strength a few weeks later and we couldn’t let him go at that point.  The lady he made the other 10 babies with is a different story.  My husband found her inside our house and I told him to let her go, but instead he put her in with “Gimpy.”  They had sex the same night :).

The Life of Ernest E. Williams

For some reason, this obituary of Ernest Williams is going around the internet again, 9+ years after it was published in the Harvard Gazette.

Ernest Edward Williams

Faculty of Arts and Sciences — Memorial Minute

At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 19, 2009, the following Minute was placed upon the records.

Ernest Williams was a man of many contrasts. Biology at Harvard in the third quarter of the last century was full of outsized personalities—titans in the field with strong opinions and no reservations about expressing them. In such company, Williams appeared a wallflower, seemingly wishing to be anywhere but in the midst of their arguments. Yet, one-on-one, Williams had an incisive wit and a dry sarcasm—discussions with him were always stimulating and provocative as he never missed a chance to challenge one’s thinking, sometimes quite pointedly.

To some, Williams’s work came across as old-fashioned. His subject, systematics — the study of the evolutionary relationships of species—is among the oldest in science, and his papers — florid and opinionated and, above all, long—recalled an approach to scholarship no longer in vogue. Yet much of his work was boldly innovative; some papers are still widely cited, and in several cases his work was well ahead of its time, presaging approaches to the study of evolutionary biology that were not to catch on for several decades.

Ernest Edward Williams was born January 7, 1914, in Easton, Pennsylvania, the only child of middle-aged parents. Like many boys, particularly of that time, he grew up loving nature and spent many hours capturing salamanders and other creatures. After attending Lafayette College, Williams joined the Army, serving in Europe during World War II. Upon his return, Williams entered graduate school at Columbia University, where he was the last graduate student of the great anatomist William King Gregory.

Williams’s doctoral thesis focused on the structure of the neck vertebrae of turtles and how variation among species reflects their evolutionary heritage. The work demonstrated the combination of careful attention to detail with the ability to interpret results in the broader context that was to characterize Williams’s career. More than fifty years later the work is still foundational in understanding the evolution of turtle diversity.

In 1950, after completing his degree, Williams moved to Harvard, where he initially served as a laboratory coordinator for the anatomy course of the legendary paleontologist Alfred Sherwood Romer, then subsequently was appointed as an assistant professor and made coordinator of a General Education course on evolution. The Museum of Comparative Zoology’s Curator of Herpetology, Arthur Loveridge, retired in 1957, and Williams was appointed to take his place.  In 1970 Williams rose to the rank of professor and in 1972 became Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology.

Williams initially focused on continuing his work on turtle systematics, leading to a series of publications including a still-important treatise published with Loveridge in 1957. Williams soon realized, however, that the museum’s collections were inadequate for the detailed analysis he conceived, which required large samples from many populations. This recognition that the museum’s herpetological collections were wide in scope, but lacking in depth, led Williams in two directions. First, it compelled him to work greatly to expand the Herpetology Department’s holdings, ultimately leading to a quadrupling of the department’s collections (to more than 300,000 specimens) by the time he retired as curator in 1980, making the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) one of the greatest herpetological repositories in the world. Second, it led Williams’s attention to focus on lizards in the genus Anolis, a very species-rich group from the Caribbean and Central and South America. A previous curator of herpetology and director of the MCZ, Thomas Barbour, had extensively collected anoles in the Caribbean; Williams, whose focus was much more evolutionarily-oriented than most systematists of the day, recognized that this group could be a model for studying large-scale evolutionary and biogeographical phenomena.

And, indeed, they were, and still are. Williams recognized that anoles have diversified for the most part independently on each of the major islands of the Caribbean (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico); most remarkably, the end-result of these evolutionary radiations has been very similar, with the same set of habitat specialists — which Williams labeled “ecomorphs,” a term now widely employed in evolutionary biology — evolving independently on each island. Such convergence of entire faunas is a rare phenomenon and Anolis has become a textbook example.

Williams’s work on anole evolution synthesized a wide variety of fields, including biogeography, functional morphology, population genetics, behavior, and ecology. Yet, Williams was a systematist by training, with little background in most of these areas. The primary means by which Williams orchestrated this broad-based investigation of anole diversity was his ability to identify the best organismally minded graduate students in Harvard’s biology department, regardless of their specific interests. As a result, the list of Williams’s graduate students reads like a Who’s Who in ecology and evolutionary biology.

At a time when the MCZ’s curators had little say in curricular matters, Williams pioneered a highly popular course on vertebrate biology. This course, which Williams taught for many years, helped keep organismal biology alive at Harvard and was a crucial step in the creation of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB).

Williams was not the most gentle-hearted of advisors. Gruff and very critical, he had high standards, expected students and colleagues to meet them, and was not shy about letting them know when they had not. Words of praise were not handed out liberally, but were cherished when received. With undergraduates, however, Williams showed a different side, being supportive and encouraging when needed and available at any time for discussion and advice. A number of Harvard undergraduates who worked with him have gone on to become evolutionary biologists, and several have continued to work on anoles, in many cases following up on ideas he initially conceived.

Williams remained active after his retirement from the Harvard faculty in 1984, continuing his evolutionary and systematic studies. Eventually, he moved back to his native Pennsylvania, where he died in 1998, taking his encyclopedic font of knowledge with him. Nonetheless, his spirit and ideas live on in the form of his many academic descendants, which include many prominent active scientists, several members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a high-ranking U.S. government official, and the current curator of herpetology of the MCZ.

Respectfully submitted,

A. W. Crompton
Karel F. Liem
Jonathan Losos, Chair

Laws of the Lizard Premieres on the Smithsonian Channel Next Week

More information on Laws of the Lizard here.

The documentary, by Days Edge Productions, is all about anoles and the scientists who study them. Accompanying the  film is a 7-part series of short webisodesThe Lizard’s Tale. Here’s the first one:

 

Anolis eewi Rediscovered?

César Barrio (Doc Frog to those of you who know him on Facebook or through his photography) recently posted this:

Here’s more information from César:

“Well, It is not completely sure it is eewi. Anolis eewi was described from Toronó, part of Chimantá tepuy, the neighbor tepuy of Auyan, where this one was found. This individual was at the same altitude (around 2000 m) and conditions as eewi. Norops planiceps is a widespread species in northern South America, and is very variable, but the proportions and the general feeling of my nose as a taxonomist told me this was different. Probably the best way to present it is as cf. eewi, even now eewi is synonym of planiceps.”

The last sentence reminds me to point out that eewi was named after Ernest E. Williams, who was often known by his initials, EEW. Williams then wrote a paper that sunk the species into what was, at that time, A. chrysolepis (if I recall correctly). While searching for the Williams paper, I came across another paper published by Williams in Breviora in 1996 reporting specimens of A. chrysolepis eewi obsercved (collected?) in the Venezuelan tepuis.

 

Great New Song on Anole Ecology and Evolution

Song composed and performed by students at the University of Arkansas.

Effects of Military Pollutants on Green Anoles

Just out in PLoS One. Here’s the abstract:

Microbiome studies focused on ecologically relevant vertebrate models like reptiles have been limited. Because of their relatively small home range, fast maturation, and high fecundity, lizards are an excellent reptilian terrestrial indicator species. For this study we used the green anole, Anolis carolinensis, to assess the impact of military relevant contaminants on fecal microbiome composition. Fourteen day sub-acute exposures were conducted via oral gavage with 2,4,6-Trinitrotoluene (TNT) and inorganic lead at doses of 60 mg/kg and 20 mg/kg of body weight, respectively. Body weights and food consumption were monitored and fecal samples were collected for high-throughput 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and analytical chemistry at days 0 and 15. At the end of the study, liver and gut were harvested for body burden data. Chemical analysis confirmed accumulation of TNT, TNT transformation products, and lead in liver tissue and fecal samples. Bacterial community analysis of fecal material revealed significant differences between day 0 and day 15 of TNT exposed anoles with an operational taxonomic unit (OTU) within the genus Erwinia representing 32% of the microbial community in TNT exposed anoles. Predictable changes in gut microbiome composition could offer an easily assayed, noninvasive biomarker for specific chemical exposure providing enhanced scientific support to risk assessments on military installations.

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