Stephen Colbert being bitten by a green anole
All is explained in the video below.
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 17 of 129
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.
From article by Sater and Smith in March 2018 Herp. Review.
The March 2018 issue of Herpetological Review is chockful of fascinating Natural History Notes about anoles. Highlights: A male carolinensis mating with a female sagrei (we’ve seen that before!), a cristatellus eating a smaller member of the same species, a sagrei eating an anole, and communal nesting in green anoles. You can read all these stories and more, now that Natural History Notes are open access and downloadable! Click on volume 49(1), Natural History Notes.
A very ambitious brown anole
I arrived a day early for the 2018 Anolis Symposium. When it became clear I was not needed to help get things ready, I did what any red-blooded anolologist would do: I headed off for All-America Park, the hottest of hotspots for Miami anoles.
And what a day it was. Two minutes after leaving my hotel, I saw what I’m pretty sure was an Ameiva, though I didn’t get a good look. Then red-headed agamas underneath the monorail on the Dixie Highway.
Plenty o’ iguanas. How many can you find?
How many green iguanas can you find?
And curly-tailed lizards!
Along the way, I also saw three introduced anoles: (A. sagrei, A. cristatellus and A. distichus).
Anolis distichus
Finally, I got to All-America Park and immediately met five-term South Miami mayor Phil Stoddard, who doubles as a crackerjack neuroethologist at Florida International University, and is a great naturalist to boot. We walked around the park looking for Anolis garmani, the Jamaican giant anole, but without success. There were plenty of other anoles at the Park, all the same ones I’d already seen, but also a knight anole and 13 green anoles–they definitely are doing just fine despite all the invasives. The lizard search was conducted to a soundtrack of screeching peacocks and the occasional flock of parrots flying back. I love Miami! Sadly, no Jamaican giant anoles, A. garmani. That’ll have to wait for a return visit.
Anolis equestris at All-America Park
Fairchild Botanical Gardens, site of the 2018 Anolis Symposium
It’s not to late to hop on a plane and get to beautiful Fairchilds Botanical Garden! Abstracts are posted. Here’s the schedule:
9:00 – 9:30 James Stroud Florida International University
Introduction and Welcome
9:30 – 9:45 Michele A. Johnson Trinity University
Physiological mechanisms underlying behavioral convergence in Caribbean anoles
9:45 – 10:00 Tony Gamble Marquette University
Anolis sex chromosomes, past, present, and future
10:00 – 10:15 Rosario Castañeda Universidad Icesi
When did anoles diverge? An analysis of multiple dating strategies
10:15 – 10:30 Colin Donihue Harvard University
Hurricane-induced adaptive shifts in the morphology of an island lizard
10:30 – 10:45 Leo J. Fleishman Union College
Why are there so many yellow dewlaps?
10:45 – 11:30 Coffee Break
11:30 – 11:45 Graham Reynolds University of North Carolina Asheville
Genetic and Morphometric Diversification in the Brown Anole Suggest Early Pathways of Anole Colonization and Evolution in the Caribbean
11:45 – 12:00 Nathalie Feiner Lund University
Transposable elements, Hox gene clusters and genome evolution– How special are Anolis lizards?
12:00 – 12:15 Thomas J. Sanger Loyola University Chicago
The Mechanisms of Thermal Stress Induced Craniofacial Malformation in Lizards Developmental biology
12:15 – 12:30 Sozos N. Michaelides University of Rhode Island
Invasion history of four Anolis lizard species introduced to Bermuda Invasion biology
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 14:15 Kristin M. Winchell University of Massachusetts Boston
Performance Consequences of Urban Morphological Shifts
14:15 – 14:30 Kenro Kusumi Arizona State University
Comparative Genomics Reveals Accelerated Evolution in Conserved Pathways during Anolis Diversification
14:30 – 14:45 Sean Giery University of Connecticut
Some thoughts on the trophic ecology of Anolis lizards
14:45 – 15:00 D. Luke Mahler University of Toronto
Land use and the restructuring of anole communities across an elevational gradient
15:00 – 15:45 Coffee Break
15:45 – 16:00 Ivan Prates Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
Genomic signatures of adaptation associated with a history of range expansions in South American anoles
16:00 – 16:15 Oriol Lapiedra Harvard University / CREAF
Predator-induced natural selection in behavior Behaviour
16:15 – 16:30 Caitlin C. Mothes University of Miami
Using South Florida’s exotic lizard community to evaluate the use of ecological niche models in predicting biotic invasions
16:30 – 17:00 Neil Losin Day’s Edge Productions
The Lizard’s Tale and Anole Annals v2.0: An enhanced platform for Anolis outreach
17:00
Social & Poster Session
Saturday, 17 March 2018
9:30 – 9:45 Douglas B. Menke University of Georgia
Genome editing methods for the production of genetically modified anoles
9:45 – 10:00 Sarin Tiatragul Auburn University
A shady way to beat the Miami heat
10:00 – 10:15 Joanna O. Palade Arizona State University
Anolis carolinensis satellite cells have expanded musculoskeletal potential
10:15 – 10:30 Gregory C. Mayer University of Wisconsin-
Parkside Using archival DNA to elucidate anole phylogeny Systematics and/or taxonomy
10:30 – 10:45 Liam J. Revell Universidad del Rosario and UMass Boston
Can we detect differences in the rate of discrete character evolution between clades of anoles?
10:45 – 11:30 Coffee Break
11:30 – 11:45 Amber N. Wright University of Hawaii
Predicting the outcome of species interactions in a novel species assemblage: Anolis vs. Phelsuma in Hawaii
11:45 – 12:00 Andrew C. Battles University of Rhode Island
The other Miami Heat: Urban areas alter thermal biology and influence persistence and spread of two invasive Anolis species.
12:00 – 12:15 Nathan W. Turnbough I
Covariation in arthropod community composition and dominant anole identity on dredge spoils islands in Florida
12:15 – 12:30 Cindy Xu Arizona State University
Tail Regeneration in Anole Lizards: Insights from Comparative Genomic Analysis and Reformation of the Peripheral Motor Nervous System
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 14:15 Michael L. Logan Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Using experimental islands to explore evolutionary dynamics under climate change Thermal biology, ecology, or evolution
14:15 – 14:30 Christine Rose-Smyth Verdant Isle Orchids
Role of a sweet-toothed anole in orchid pollination Species interactions
14:30 – 14:45 Christopher J. Thawley University of Rhode Island
Let There Be Light: Widespread Use of Human-Produced Light at Night by Anoles and Its Consequences
14:45 – 15:00 Sean Doody USF St. Petersburg Environmentally Cued Hatching in Anoles Behaviour
15:00 – 15:45 Coffee Break
15:45 – 16:00 Winter A. Beckles University of Miami Signal divergence and habitat partitioning among non-native bark anoles in South Florida
16:00 – 16:15 Stephanie L. Clements University of Miami
Non-native species dominate herpetofaunal community composition in both native and non-native habitat patches in Miami-Dade County
16:15 – 16:30 Zachary A. Chejanovski University of Rhode Island
Predators influence prey body size variation in an urban landscape
16:30 – 16:45 Joshua M. Hall Auburn University
Does season-dependent reproductive value of offspring drive the evolution of life-history traits in Anolis lizards?
16:45 – 17:00 Jonathan Losos Washington University in St. Louis
Concluding Remarks
One of our marked lizards for this study. Photo by Jon Suh.
Ambika Kamath has written a synthesis of her two recent papers in territoriality in anoles. It appeared on March 12, 2018 on her blog, Behavioral Ecology, Natural History, Science and Society and is reprinted below:
In my major Ph.D. project, I questioned the idea that territoriality is a good or useful description of Anolis lizards’ mating systems. When I began working on this question, I planned to primarily use an empirical approach, measuring the movement patterns and mating patterns of a population of Anolis sagrei in a way that didn’t depend on territoriality. But anticipating future criticism, I realised that because I’d be working in one population of one species, my empirical work could readily and reasonably be dismissed as an aberration without a broader foundation on which to place it.
This realization led to the historical review in which my Ph.D. advisor Jonathan Losos and I examined the history of research on Anolis territoriality. I’ve written about this historical research quite a bit before, but haven’t said much about the empirical work, leaving the two complementary halves of this project unintegrated. That’s partly been because the empirical work wasn’t published until recently. But it’s also because in contextualizing the problem tackled by the empirical paper, I have to basically recount the whole of the historical review. There really hasn’t been room to talk about both in a single venue, and there still isn’t, but I’m going to tell you a bit more about the empirical paper to balance things out. You’ve heard a little about it before–I wrote field notes about one of the males in this study (interesting addendum: U131 fathered none of the offspring of the females he encountered!) and about a tiny survey of green anoles that we conducted concurrently.
The empirical paper is now published, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B! Here’s an awesome press release about the study from UCSB that will give you the gist of it, but in short what we did was:
- Catch and mark almost every lizard we saw, and then measure the spatial locations of as many lizards as we could by repeatedly surveying as big an area as we could.
- Make a map of all the trees within our sampling area.
- Measure the body size and estimate the population-level growth rate of males
- Collect a subset of the females, bring them into the lab, and collect the DNA of their offspring.
- Devise a mathematical approach to estimating encounters between males and females from data on their spatial locations. Combined this with the growth-rate estimate to calculate the size of males at their encounters with females.
- Use DNA sequencing to figure out the likely fathers of the females’ offspring; we leaned on the estimates of male-female encounters to do so.
- Use a clever and (I think!) pretty original approach to quantifying sexual selection on body size and movement patterns by comparing the traits of males that encountered females to the traits of the subset of those males that actually fathered offspring.
In sum what we found was that male and female movement patterns spanned larger areas and were more dynamic than many of us had previously imagined, that females encounter multiple potential mates, that at least 60% and possibly up to 80% of females mate with multiple males, and that sexual selection acts on male body size as well as males’ spatial extent and the timing of male-female encounters. I’ll let you read the press release and the paper itself to learn more about what we found (here it is on BioRxiv, essentially the same paper but freely accessible)!
Viewed together, I hope the historical and empirical papers make a convincing case that we’ve been looking at Anolis mating systems in a limited way for a long time, and that other, newer ways of quantifying mating systems in ways that don’t depend on territoriality can yield both interesting and sensible results. I see this work as opening up an arena of questions, both in Anolis and in other taxa where mating systems have been described in a static way for a long period of time.
I’m very proud of this paper. I remember a phase of grad school when I found it impossible to convince people that this work would turn out interesting, or maybe it was just that my own self-doubt prevented me from seeing others’ interest and support for this research. It remains true that this is one study of one population of one species, and it may well be that I turn out to be all wrong. Perhaps new explorations of Anolis mating systems will eventually lead us back to territoriality. But even if that’s the case, I feel confident that, thanks to this work, we’ll be able to approach that or any description of Anolis mating systems with clearer, more skeptical, and more discerning eyes.
This won’t be the last you’ll be hearing from me on this subject of lizard mating systems; for one, there are responses to our historical review that are in the process of being published, and we’ll have a chance to respond to them. I’m very excited to engage in an actual scientific dispute, and will do my best to do so respectfully and productively, especially since I have on-the-record views about what makes such disputes annoying. But in terms of research, I seem to be heading in other directions, which I think will be related to this work but maybe not directly. So I wanted to make sure that I put down here, all in one place, what I see this project as and what I hope it will achieve. Let me know what you think!
The latest Dr. Anole…but not for long! Stroud wowed a packed house at Florida, regaling the audience with four chapters of research, two of which are already published in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution & Systematics and Invasion Biology (2 of the ca. 40 papers he published during his time at FIU. The self-proclaimed highlight of his work? Publishing on T. rex!
Congratulations, James!
In an event probably unprecedented in anole history, two new anole doctors will emerge tomorrow. After a multi-year incubation, AA stalwarts Kristin Winchell and James Stroud will hatch tomorrow almost simultaneously. James will get the festivities rolling at 11 a.m. eastern time in Miami:
Kristin follows shortly thereafter at 1 p.m. in Boston:
By this time tomorrow, the ranks of Dr. Anolis will be increased by two. Congratulations Kristin and James!
Anolis carolinensis on Kauai. Photo by Jonathan Losos.
Green anoles (A. carolinensis) have been introduced to a number of Pacific islands, including Hawaii. In a recent paper in Current Herpetology (published by the Herpetological Society of Japan), Goldberg and Kraus examine the reproductive cycle of Hawaiian green anoles and find it very similar to what occurs in their native range.
Here’s the abstract of the paper:
Reproduction was studied in an invasive population of Anolis carolinensis in the Hawaiian Islands, USA. Timing of events in the reproductive cycle was similar between A. carolinensis populations in Hawaii and native populations of the species in the southeastern United States. In Hawaii, males of A. carolinensisundergo a prolonged period of spermiogenesis (sperm formation) starting in November (n=1) and December (n=1) and continuing into August. Gravid A. carolinensis females in Hawaii (n=40) produce one egg in continuous succession from March into August. Reproductive activity in A. carolinensis in Hawaii ceased prior to the colder, wetter, winter months.
A press release from Arizona State University:
A tale of two studies: ASU researchers uncover mechanisms of lizard tail regeneration
Findings on stem cells, nerve regrowth offer intriguing clues that may one day translate to human therapy
January 30, 2018With the hope that someday scientists will advance regenerative therapy in humans, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Arizona State University and two other institutions has discovered important new clues in exactly how lizards regenerate their tails.
The findings appear in a pair of studies published in a Jan. 15 special issue of the journal Developmental Biology that focused on regeneration. The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix and Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute also participated in the studies.
A green anole lizard (Anolis carolinensis). Photo: Kenro Kusumi.
In one paper, scientists from ASU investigated the role of a muscle stem cell population called “satellite” cells. Regeneration involves making new muscle, cartilage and tendons and requires cells that will become these tissues in a regrown tail.
The researchers found that the muscle satellite cells in green anole lizards (Anolis carolinensis) do double duty and can become cartilage as well. This study provides the first functional description of this stem cell population in lizards.
“Satellite cells are a unique stem cell population that allows humans to grow and repair muscle tissue,” said senior author Jeanne Wilson-Rawls, associate professor with ASU School of Life Sciences. “Mammals, including mice and humans, have muscles that contain these cells. After an injury, these satellite cells can repair the remaining muscle, but they cannot replace lost muscle in humans, unlike in lizards.”
“Using cell culture techniques, we found that lizard satellite cells behave the same as mouse satellite cells,” said Joanna Palade, lead author of the first paper and graduate student in the ASU molecular and cellular biology graduate program. “However, while both cell types can differentiate into muscle, only lizard satellite cells can turn on the genes and proteins required to make cartilage.”
By studying the genetic programming in mice and lizards, the researchers hope to find the differences between them that make the lizard more capable of regeneration.
“Lizards and humans have most of the same genes,” said Kenro Kusumi, co-author of the study and professor with the school. “Working with expert computer scientists, we found the genes that control cartilage formation were turned on in lizard but not mouse satellite cells, pointing to the existence of a possible switch that must be activated for regenerative therapies.”
A green anole lizard (Anolis carolinensis) with a regenerated tail. Photo: Joel Robertson
In a second study, the scientists found that nerve regeneration in particular, is a critical part of the tail regeneration process.
“Nerve regrowth is immediate in the regenerated lizard tail,” said Cindy Xu, co-author of the paper and also a graduate student in the program. “Regenerating nerves quickly repopulate the tail as muscle begins to form. As the neuromuscular junction matures, the nerves are pruned back but remain more numerous when compared to the original tail.”
In this study, the researchers allowed lizards to regenerate their tails up to 250 days and then studied the neuromuscular junctions — the connections between nerve and muscle — at different stages. Coordinated tail movements require effective communication between neurons and tail muscles through these neuromuscular junctions resulting in muscle contraction.
“Overall, we found that the regeneration of neuromuscular junctions in the lizard followed a pattern similar to development in mice and humans,” said Minami Tokuyama, co-author of the paper and former research technician in Kusumi’s lab. “However, the regenerated muscle ends up with a greater density of neuromuscular junctions, and studying these differences may be important in developing future therapies for humans.”
Together, these findings may bring researchers closer to solving the challenge of creating the capability for limb or organ regeneration in humans.
The research team included Kusumi, Palade, Tokuyama, Wilson-Rawls and Xu, as well as Jason Newbern and Alan Rawls, who are faculty with ASU’s School of Life Sciences; Rebecca Fisher with ASU School of Life Sciences and the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix; and Joshua Ho and Djordje Djordjevic from Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. The National Institutes of Health funded this research through grants.
A female green anole from Hahajima in the Osagawara Islands.
We’ve had a series of posts about the anoles of the Osagawara Islands, of Japan, the “Galápagos of the Orient” [1, 2]. Now a new paper (pdf here) from Masakado Kawata’s lab has resequenced genomes of multiple individuals and measured morphology to assess how large the founding population was and what sorts of morphological changes have occurred since colonization, as well as identifying some genes potentially under selection.
Here’s the abstract:
Invaded species often can rapidly expand and establish in novel environments through adaptive evolution, resulting in devastating effects on native communities. However, it is unclear if genetic variation at whole-genomic levels is actually reduced in the introduced populations and which genetic changes have occurred responding to adaptation to new environments. In the 1960s, Anolis carolinensis was introduced onto one of the Ogasawara Islands, Japan, and subsequently expanded its range rapidly throughout two of the islands. Morphological comparison showed that lower hindlimb length in the introduced populations tended to be longer than those in its native Florida populations. Using re-sequenced whole genomic data, we estimated that the effective population size at the time of introduction was actually small (less than 50). We also inferred putative genomic regions subject to natural selection after this introduction event using SweeD and a method based on Tajima’s D, π and FST. Five candidate genes that were potentially subject to selection were estimated by both methods.The results suggest that there were standing variations that could potentially contribute to adaptation to nonnative environments despite the founder population being small.