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.
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 :).
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
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 webisodes, The Lizard’s Tale. Here’s the first one:
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.
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.
The little known and very rare Anolis darlingtoni, endemic to Haiti and likely to disappear. Photo by Miguel Landestoy from Haiti National Trust website
Analysis of satellite imagery and aerial photographs indicate that all of Haiti’s remaining primary forest will disappear in less than two decades if current deforestation rates continue. Results indicate primary forest cover in Haiti shrank from 4.4 percent in 1988 to just 0.32 percent in 2016, and that 42 of Haiti’s 50 largest mountains have lost all of their primary forest cover.
These forests are home to endangered animals found nowhere else in the world; researchers say the country is already experiencing a mass extinction event due to habitat loss.
Deforestation-intensified flooding has also been implicated in thousands of human deaths.
Researchers say Haiti’s forest loss is driven largely by charcoal production and agriculture.
New findings indicate that at current deforestation rates, all of Haiti’s primary forest will be gone within the next two decades, leading to the loss of most of the country’s endemic species.
The study was authored by researchers at Temple University, Oregon State University, the U.S. Forest Service and Société Audubon Haiti, a non-profit conservation organization based in Haiti. Its results were published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
By analyzing aerial photography and satellite images, researchers discovered that primary forest cover in Haiti shrank from 4.4 percent in 1988 to just 0.32 percent in 2016. They report that 42 of Haiti’s 50 largest mountains have lost all of their primary forests and the country is already undergoing a mass extinction of its wildlife due to habitat loss.
“Haiti’s recognized as having the highest proportion of threatened amphibians in the world,” said S. Blair Hedges, director of Temple University’s Center for Biodiversity and lead author of the study, in an interview with Mongabay. “And that’s largely from the deforestation.”
The critically endangered Macaya breast-spotted frog (Eleutherodactylus thorectes) is one of Haiti’s endemic species that lives in primary forests. Image courtesy of Claudio ContrerasThe critically endangered short-nosed green frog (Eleutherodactylus brevirostris) is found only in the primary forests of one small mountain range in Haiti. Image courtesy of Claudio Contreras
Other species at risk include the Hispaniolan solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus), a large shrew-like animal native to Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic. One of the oldest mammals on the planet, the solenodon survived the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
But it’s not faring well in today’s world.
“It’s almost extinct,” Hedges said. “It’s very, very hard to find.” However, the team did see recent evidence of one in mountainous primary forest during a biodiversity survey that took place between 2009 and 2015.
A solenodon is fitted with a radio collar to track its movements. Photo by Tiffany Roufs
In all, the survey turned up 28 species that are endemic to specific mountaintops – including several new frog species. Hedges says there were likely many more, but as their habitat disappeared, so did they.
“Unfortunately entire mountains have been deforested before biologists have surveyed them, so there were almost certainly many more species that we will never know about,” Hedges said.
Along with the extinctions of unique animals found nowhere else, Haiti’s deforestation has another consequence: landslides and flooding. The researchers found that without tree roots to hold soil, mountains tended to lose their topsoil to erosion soon after deforestation. And without trees to sop up rainwater, lowland areas are much more prone to catastrophic floods.
“Hundreds to thousands of Haitians die each year from flooding that is largely deforestation-related,” Hedges said. He pointed to a flooding event in 2004 that killed more than 1,200 people in a single town.
Hedges says that Haiti’s deforestation is largely driven by small-scale farming and charcoal production, which involves harvesting wood and heating it to remove water and volatile compounds. Doing this turns wood into a source of fuel that can be burned without producing as much smoke.
Around 11 million people live in Haiti, and many of them depend on wood charcoal for fuel and subsistence farming for food. As the lowlands lost their trees, people began deforesting higher and higher into the mountains.
Haitian primary forest being cut and burned. Image courtesy of Eladio Fernandez
The researchers witnessed this first-hand while conducting their biodiversity surveys, even encountering locals at study sites they had to use a helicopter to reach.
“I did a lot of hiking and we would run into Haitians at the most remote places in the country,” Hedges said.
Even protected areas aren’t immune from deforestation. Hedges recalled meeting a ranger a few years ago in Pic Macaya National Park – one of the last remaining sites of primary forest in Haiti.
“He told us that there were only 20 of them [rangers] but at any given time there are at least 200 teams of tree cutters all throughout the park – it’s a really big area – and they all have weapons, yet the rangers don’t have any weapons.”
In their study, Hedges and his colleagues write that Haiti’s two original national parks, Pic Macaya and La Visite, lost between 60 and 75 percent of their primary forest cover since they were declared protected areas 35 years ago. The researchers say improved monitoring is needed if forests – particularly primary forests – can be saved.
“Expanded detection and monitoring of primary forest globally will improve the efficiency of conservation measures, inside and outside of protected areas,” the authors write.
A deforested mountain in the Haitian Chaîne de Matheux. Image courtesy of S. Blair Hedges
Monitoring forests starts with figuring out what really counts as forest, which can be surprisingly contentious. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), for instance, defines forest as “Land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent.”
However, according to Hedges, such a generous definition can distort the reality of a country’s forest cover and overlook primary forests, which are vital for biodiversity.
“When [the FAO defines] forests as having up to 90 percent of the trees missing, many of us would not call that forest, “ Hedges said, adding, “for a biologist like myself it’s almost absurd really.”
The FAO doesn’t plan on changing its approach to forest definition, according to Anssi Pekkarinen, team leader of the FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment. However, he says they are allowing “more detailed reporting at the sub-category level,” which includes differentiation of “planted forest” and “naturally regenerating“ forest.
“FAO is also working together with its partners to further improve the consistency of the reporting on primary forest,” Pekkarinen told Mongabay. “This work was initiated in 2017 and is expected to be completed within the coming years.”
Primary forest in Montagnes Macaya in the Massif de la Hotte, a biodiversity-rich region of Haiti. Image courtesy of Claudio ContrerasThe critically endangered Hispaniolan ventriloquial frog (Eleutherodactylus dolomedes) is found only in the forests of Haiti’s Massif de la Hotte. Image courtesy of Claudio Contreras
In response to the country’s deforestation crisis, reforestation projects have popped up, including Haiti Takes Root and the USAID Reforestation Project launched in January 2018, which aims to plant more than five million trees.
While reforestation can have positive outcomes, Hedges and his colleagues say that preservation of primary forest is the best way to stymie extinction.
“Primary forest is critical for maintaining much of the world’s biodiversity, and its loss is the greatest threat to species survival, even if primary forest is later replaced by secondary growth,” they write.
The researchers note that even places where some primary forest is left standing quickly become un-forested due to degradation. “However, lightly disturbed habitats could provide lifelines for some species if protected and allowed to recover.”
To help Haiti hold on to its forests and biodiversity, Hedges started an NGO called the Haiti National Trust that is set to purchase a mountain in Haiti in a bid to preserve its remaining primary forest.
“Our mission is to protect the last primary forests and biodiversity hot spots,” Hedges said. “It is a big task and will require a large inflow of resources, but I remain optimistic.”
Citation: Hedges, S. B., Cohen, W. B., Timyan, J., & Yang, Z. (2018). Haiti’s biodiversity threatened by nearly complete loss of primary forest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201809753.
Act quickly! They’re spiffy, and make great stocking stuffers. Go to zazzle.com, search for “anolis watch.” Or follow this link. Use code “HOLIDAYZSAVE.”
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 :).
