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.
Javier Sunyer is a Spanish herpetologist who has lived in the Neotropics for the last 20 years. His work includes over 80 scientific papers and notes, dealing mostly with the distribution, natural history, and conservation of the Nicaraguan herpetofauna. Currently, he is a Research Associate at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua-León (UNAN-León) and an Associate Editor/Section Editor for Mesoamerican Herpetology. Pictured on our cover is an image of Kempton’s Anole (Norops kemptoni), photographed in January 2006 at Alto Chiquero, Parque Nacional Volcán Barú, Provincia de Chiriquí, Panama. Adult males are territorial, and often display their colorful dewlap to intruders.
What a horrible way to go! We’ve reported on this before [e.g., 1, 2, 3], but not Folt and Lapinski have published a nice review in Phyllomedusa of wandering and orb weaver spiders eating frogs and lizards in Costa Rica.
Wild About Texas: Brown anole got to Texas as fast as it could
Michael Price, Special to San Angelo Standard-TimesPublished 6:00 p.m. CT Dec. 23, 2017
Living in the day and age where memes on social media are the prevailing means of communication does have a FEW benefits. I can almost always count on having a good laugh daily at something someone has posted.
Just the other day, I saw a meme that stated, “I was not born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could!” As a naturalist, all I could think about when I saw this posted was one particular species of lizard that has found its way here, and that species is the brown anole.
The brown anole (Anolis sagrei) is one of two species of anoles that currently reside in Texas, but this species is not native to this state. First established near Houston in the 1970’s, this species was known only from areas around Houston, San Antonio and Brownsville as late as the turn of the century.
However, now it can be seen in and among most metro areas within an imaginary triangle that pinnacles in the DFW area, east of I-35 and west of I-45. It has only recently been observed (2016) in the Metroplex, and there have not been enough observations to verify whether there is a breeding population there or not. Even more recently, a smattering of individuals had been reported from a nursery in the city limits of Midland and these observations have been verified.
Originally native to the Bahamas and Cuba, this species has been introduced and is thriving in areas outside of Texas as well. It is arguably the most common lizard observed throughout the southern 2/3 of Florida, and it can also be seen throughout the eastern seaboard of Mexico.
The habitats that this invasive lizard prefers are settings in densely vegetated areas. Although occasional specimens are discovered basking and foraging in short shrubs and trees, the vast majority of sightings are of individuals in terrestrial settings. It is the propensity for living among ornamental plants and shrubs that has enabled this species to thrive in the warmer climates outside of its natural range. Therefore, many Brown Anoles are observed living around landscaped human habitations such as houses and even businesses.
The brown anole is among the most plainly colored and yet most intricately patterned lacertilian species in the United States. Unlike the native green anole (which can vary in coloration from green to tan to brown), this anole is always a shade of brown. The scales on the back are small and granular in appearance and texture, and females are often plainly patterned, adorned only with a light stripe that runs lengthwise down the spine. Males on the other hand are patterned with an intricate array of lightly outlined dark wedges and blotches along the spine.
Both species have varying amounts of dark striping that extends behind the eyes. Males have a brightly colored dewlap that, when extended, is dark red. The limbs are long, and are often colored patterned with dark stripes or bands. The head is not nearly as elongated like the green anole and is not noticeably separated from the body, and the tail, which is colored like the back, is about one-half of the 8-inch total length.
Brown anoles, like other lizard species, are “cold-blooded”, or ectothermic. This means that it does not generate heat from the inside of their body, as mammals and birds do, but rather is dependent on outside sources for heating and cooling. It is active during the early mornings and late afternoons from early April to October, and like many other reptile species it avoids the hottest part of the day by resting in shaded areas. However, the fact that it resides primarily in tropical areas, it is often active throughout the year.
This species of lizard is an opportunistic carnivore, feeding primarily on small insects such as moths, butterflies, crickets, grasshoppers, beetles, and the like.
The brown anole is oviparous, which is a fancy way of saying that it lays eggs. During the breeding season, which typically begins in early spring and extends into late summer, males will attempt to attract females by extending his bright red dewlap (a flap of skin underneath the chin) while bobbing his head up and down in a “push-up” manner.
Following successful copulations, the female will begin to lay clutches of a single egg. By laying an egg about every two weeks, a female can lay as many as 12 eggs in a season. These eggs are laid in areas of high humidity, and typically will hatch in about five weeks. The two-inch long hatchlings are smaller imitations of the female, and are capable of fending for themselves immediately.
This lizard species is a gregarious basker and will often allow people to get rather close as it relies upon its coloration for protection. However, once it feels an intruder has approached too close for comfort, it will quickly dart for cover among the leaf litter.
Michael Price is owner of Wild About Texas, an educational company that specializes in venomous animal safety training, environmental consultations and ecotourism. Contact him at wildabouttexas@gmail.com.
Night time’s not just for sleeping in the festive anole.
Everyone knows that anoles are diurnal, active by day and snoozing by night. Yet the rascals are opportunistic–light up the night, and they’ll take advantage to extend their carousing and foraging. We’ve had reports on such behavior before [1, 2] in the green and knight anoles (and there are more reports in the literature); now such behavior is reported in the brown anole from Guatemala, in a recent paper by Brown and Arrivillaga published recently in Mesoamerican Herpetology.
Film Screening: Sneak Preview of Laws of the Lizard + Q&A with Filmmakers
Date:
Monday, December 11, 2017, 6:00pm
Location:
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street
When scientists ask big questions about the laws of nature, they sometimes seek out improbable partners—such as lizards—to find the answers. In their new documentary, Laws of the Lizard, award-winning filmmakers Nate Dappen and Neil Losin partner with scientists to tell the surprising story of anole lizards.
During a year-long quest that took them from tiny Bahamian islands and Caribbean rainforests, to metropolitan Miami, Dappen and Losin capture cutting-edge science, new anole species, and never-before-seen behaviors. They quickly came to understand why Jonathan Losos, Harvard evolutionary biologist—and anole lizard expert—humorously says “Any study you do is more interesting if you do it on anoles!”
Join us for a special preview screening of Laws of the Lizard—coming to the Smithsonian Channel in 2018—followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and Harvard Professor Jonathan Losos.
Anolis desechensis is a variant of A. cristatellus found on the Puerto Rican island of Desecheo. The island has a diversity of other species, many of them of conservation value, but it has been devastated by introduced species. The good news: concerted actions have removed most of the invaders, and the island is recovering! Read all about it in the post below, which appeared on Cool Green Science.
Recovery: The Salvation of Desecheo National Wildlife Refuge
Isla Desecheo, Puerto Rico. Photo by Claudio Uribe/Island Conservation
Good news is scarce in Puerto Rico these days. But if you look 13 miles to the west, on a 358-acre island called Desecheo, you’ll find a mother lode.
Desecheo, once the Caribbean’s most important brown booby breeding habitat, was made a national wildlife refuge in 1976. This was something of a futile gesture because invasive aliens — black rats, feral goats and macaque monkeys — had extirpated the brown boobies (which once numbered around 10,000) along with the seven other nesting sea-bird species. The invasive species also blighted forests and the federally threatened Higo Chumbo cactus, and reduced native land birds, reptiles and invertebrates to a shadow of their former abundance.
Desecheo was an ecological wasteland.
In 1976 there was virtually nothing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could do about that. But in 1994 it acquired a powerful ally with the founding of Island Conservation (IC), a nonprofit team of biologists dedicated to preventing extinctions around the globe. There was and is no shortage of work. Although islands comprise a miniscule fraction of Earth’s landmass they harbor about half of all endangered species. At least 80 percent of the 245 recorded animal extinctions since 1500 have occurred on islands.
IC and multiple partners (frequently The Nature Conservancy) have thus far removed invasive mammals from 59 islands thereby benefitting 1,090 populations of 402 native species and subspecies. Research just released by IC, Birdlife International, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the University of California at Santa Cruz demonstrates that 41 percent of the planet’s vertebrates threatened with extinction can be saved by ridding certain islands of invasive mammals.
Last July, after an exhausting, expensive ten-year battle, IC and its partners certified that Desecheo National Wildlife Refuge was free of macaques (if you don’t count a single, aging female) and rats. The last feral goat was removed in 2009.
Such successes were impossible before the advent of recent technology including: the anticoagulant rodenticide brodifacoum, sufficiently fast acting to kill rats before they learn to avoid it; thermal imaging which allows partners to detect alien mammals at night and in forest canopies; GIS (Geographic Information System) for recording precise positions on Earth’s surface so that rodenticide-laced bait can be applied to every part of an island; and satellite imaging to determine when islands lose greenery so eradications can happen when less food is available to aliens.
Higo Chumbo by the Coast, Isla Desecheo. Photo by Island Conservation
Even with goats (introduced in 1788) and rats (introduced circa 1900) a few sea birds hung on. What finally did them in were the macaques, unleashed in 1966 for medical research by the then clueless National Institutes of Health.
Ecological Illiteracy Leads to Ecological Wastelands
The most formidable obstacle confronting IC and partners is ecological illiteracy. They get savaged by chemophobes who fear and loathe all poisons in all situations and by animal-rights types who defend alien wildlife, rats included, and decry the often unavoidable, increasingly minor and always inconsequential bykill of non-target wildlife.
The Desecheo project, however, proceeded unopposed. It wasn’t as if Puerto Ricans are more enlightened than other Americans. It’s just that they live in an alien-infested hell of macaques that tear up their gardens and bite them, exposing them to the herpes B virus (relatively harmless to macaques but usually fatal to humans), feral hogs and feral goats which also tear up their gardens, feral cats which infect them and wildlife with toxoplasmosis, and a biblical plague of rats and house mice.
Public reaction was different at Channel Islands National Park off southern California. When IC and partners set about saving and restoring a host of native species including the endangered ashy storm-petrel, imperiled Scripps’s murrelet, Cassin’s Auklet and Anacapa deer mouse by eradicating black rats, they were delayed by litigation. Typical commentary in the local press included: “Species go extinct all the time” and “Who are humans to call other species invasive?” Park rangers were obliged to wear bulletproof vests; and shortly before the first bait application, two men landed on Anacapa Island in an inflatable boat and started flinging pellets of vitamin K — brodifacoum’s antidote.
Desecheo Beach Camp. Photo by Claudio Uribe/Island Conservation
Had Anacapa been infested with macaques, recovery would have been a political impossibility.
Prudently, IC doesn’t talk it up about how it, the USDA’s Wildlife Services and a nonprofit group called White Buffalo removed macaques from Desecheo. But it’s important for the public to understand just how difficult and heroic was this effort, a first in island recovery. Learning as they worked, the partners first tried baiting and trapping. It failed. They had better results with rifles but had to bring in thermal-imaging equipment when the macaques retreated to the forest canopy.
“It was a hell hole,” recalls White Buffalo’s president, Dr. Anthony DeNicola. “Ninety or 100 degrees with no place to get out of the sun.”
IC and White Buffalo staffers would sit for 14 hours a day, scanning trees and terrain with binoculars. Toward the end it would take them a month to take out one or two monkeys. Finally they had to bring in tagged, sterilized “Judas animals” from Puerto Rico to socialize with the few remaining wild ones and reveal their presence. It took five years to finish the job.
Desecheo bird eggs. Photo by Claudio Uribe/Island Conservation
Safe for Birds Again
The reluctance of IC to offer such details in its press releases and interviews doesn’t mean it tries to fly under the radar. “That would be inconsistent with our values,” remarks Heath Packard, IC’s director of government and public relations. It would also be illegal under the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires IC and its federal partners to engage with the public, disclosing alternatives and their various consequences.
Brown Booby, Isla Desecheo. Photo by Island Conservation
“The outreach is always the same,” says IC’s global affairs director, Gregg Howald. “It’s just that results of that outreach vary widely from location to location.”
Citing the Polynesian rat eradication on Lehua Island off Hawaii, completed September 13, Howald offers this: “For years we’d been reaching out to the community with blog postings, talking with people and holding public meetings. It wasn’t until late July that a few vocal individuals realized this was really going to happen and started trying to stop it, making lots of noise and drawing media attention. It was just off the rails. We had a public meeting in which people yelled at us for over two hours. It was horrible. Despite all our outreach, we wound up with a confrontation that started a cascade of anti-project misinformation.”
For example, the Huffington Post ran an op-ed by one Maggie Sergio (whom it identified as a “writer, conservationist and concerned citizen of the planet”) suggesting that five pilot whales, which later beached themselves on Kauai and died (as they commonly do everywhere they exist) were victims of diphacinone — an impossibility. Sergio also claimed that “three aerial poison drops, totaling 11.5 tons of diphacinone” were delivered by helicopter. There isn’t enough diphacinone in the world to drop 11.5 tons. What was dropped was 8.5 tons of bait of which .005 percent was diphacinone. This and other misinformation was recycled by local media.
Endemic Desecheo Anole, Isla Desecheo. Photo by Armando Feliciano/Island Conservation
It was exactly this sort of fear mongering that motivated the partners to use diphacinone, less toxic and therefore less effective than brodifacoum. But apparently it worked. “So far so good,” says Howald. All the rats we collared and monitored died. It will take time to tell for sure [if the project succeeded]. We did state in our environmental assessment that if diphacinone failed, we could come back in with brodifacoum.”
Either way Lehua Island will again be safe for federally threatened Newell’s shearwaters, band-rumped storm-petrels now a candidate for Endangered Species Act protection, wedge-tailed shearwaters, brown boobies, red-footed boobies, Laysan albatrosses, black-footed albatrosses, Christmas shearwaters, Bulwer’s petrels, red-tailed tropicbirds and black noddies.
Spectacular Results
Recovery of Desecheo’s native ecosystem is just beginning, but already results are spectacular. Despite insect surveys beginning in 1914 dingy purplewing butterflies had never been observed on the island. In April their caterpillars were so abundant they defoliated Almacigo trees. (Leaves quickly regenerated.)
Desecheo Butterfly. Photo by Armando Feliciano/Island Conservation
Endemic reptiles are doing much better, particularly Desecheo anoles, Desecheo ameivas and Puerto Rican racer snakes. A Puerto Rican skink, a species rarely observed in the past, has been sighted. Invertebrate density has increased. Native fruit trees and flowers are suddenly flourishing. New leaves, preferred by goats, rats and macaques, are more abundant than in anyone’s memory. Higo Chumbo cacti are rapidly recovering; and forests, particularly understories, appear to be growing faster.
Desecheo Flower. Photo by Armando Feliciano/Island Conservation
At this writing no one has visited the island since the hurricanes, but there are no refuge buildings on Desecheo; and in the tropics vegetation bounces back quickly. As of mid-October there were new leaves and blooms on Puerto Rico.
In its island-hoping war against introduced aliens IC builds on each victory. “One thing I’ve learned is that you can get so focused on individual projects you start to lose sight of the forest for the trees,” remarks Howald. “Now that we’ve had this success what does it mean? What’s the potential of Desecheo; what’s the leverage?”
The potential and leverage, he explains, is demonstration to regulatory agencies, the funding community and, especially, the public: that the choice is salvation of nearly half the world’s endangered species or the continued presence of alien invasives; that we can’t have both; that if we want the former, we have to take out the latter; and that we can do that without risk to humans or native wildlife populations.
Desecheo Panorama. Photo by Heath Packard/Island Conservation
