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.
Anole egg from http://www.anoleimaging.com/Anoles/ag_16_egg2.html
A concerned Anole Annals reader writes in:
My dog just violently chomped a female alone. Along with her entrails protruding from her body we two eggs. One was small, under-developed the other was the size they are laid. I have at the time done my best to put it into a container and emulate the same conditions outside ( I live in Florida) with dirt, leaf litter (small) moisture and heat. I removed the placental outer membrane which would have been separated if she had laid. I feel terrible my young and excitable dog did this. Is there any hope?
We’ve come to realize, sadly, that just about everything will eat anoles. Birds are particular culprits and we’ve seen some horrifying examples of egrets downing the little green and brown fellows. Now comes a report that a whooping crane, of all things, will also indulge.
Here’s further evidence that greens and browns can coexist: A. maynardi (a relative of A. carolinensis) and A. sagrei side-by-side, ten feet up on a wall.
City living comes with unique challenges. If you’re a lizard, scaling a windowpane without sliding off is one of them. One lizard has already evolved traits to help it do just that.
“Urban areas are just another environment. The animals that live there aren’t somehow immune to natural selection,” says Kristin Winchell of the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Her team compared males of the anole lizard (Anolis cristatellus) in the Puerto Rican cities of Mayagüez, Ponce and San Juan with those in nearby forests.
They found that city lizards regularly clung to objects like walls and windows, proving that they use the full urban environment instead of restricting themselves to wild patches more similar to their forest roots.
Compared with forest-dwellers, city lizards had longer limbs and more lamellae – scale-like structures that help their toes stick to surfaces. These traits probably enable them to stay attached to slippery urban perches. “I chased a lizard that ran straight up a window 30 feet and was out of reach in 15 seconds,” says Winchell. “I couldn’t catch this well-adapted lizard.”
The team also raised urban and forest lizards from the Mayagüez region in the lab and found that differences in limb length and scale number remained, suggesting a genetic basis to the urban lizards’ abilities.
The anole frequently wows scientists with feats of rapid evolution in natural environments. The new finding suggests that this capacity applies to cities as well.
But well-studied examples are rare. “Urban evolution is a really young field,” says Winchell.
Evolutionary biologist Jason Munshi-South of Fordham University in New York agrees. “There aren’t many documented cases of urban evolution yet, but people are going to start looking for them in earnest,” he says.
Munshi-South believes Winchell’s study is an excellent addition to this emerging field. “The next step,” he says, “which I’m excited to see them do, is to identify the genes underlying these adaptive traits.”
Winchell says that, ultimately, understanding urban adaption could help conservation. “Having a grasp on which animals tolerate urbanisation gives us a better idea of which ones we need to focus on when preserving natural habitats,” she says.
The Dodo provides the full details, but here’s the gist: “I was at the zoo watching the gorilla exhibit [at the San Diego Zoo], and that little lizard came up and just froze when the gorilla started playing with it. He picked it up by the tail a few times, poked at it, but never killed it.”
As Yoel Stuart reported previously in AA‘s pages, Anolis carolinensis has become established at the San Diego Zoo. Who knows which of the zoo’s denizens will be the next to adopt an anole?
This video, shot by Johann Prescher, is of an Anolis lineatus from Curaçao, gracefully jumping from one tree to another. Note, however, what it does just as it lands, pulling up its forebody to contact the trunk with all four legs simultaneously, like a flying squirrel. The mechanics of jumping in anoles have been well-studied, but the mechanics of their landing, not so much. Good research project waiting to be done!
A letter in Anole Annals’ inbox. Can anyone help?:
I am a student from xxx High School in New York. As a science research student interested in phylogeny of squamata, I have come across Bayesian Inference quite a lot. I have spent a lot of time researching bayes theorem and how it relates to phylogeny, but have yet to find an article that makes sense to me as a sophomore in High School. Do have an explanation to bayesian inference and how it used in phylogenetic research? Being interested in phylogenetics, I have looked into researching phylogenetic relationships of Pogona based on molecular data. I have yet to find a taxonomic revision of Pogona, the latest one I found only used morphological data, Taxonomy of Pogona (Reptilia: Lacertilia: Agamidae) by Witten in 1994. Do you think this would be a good topic for me? In addition to selecting genera to study, I have had trouble understanding the methodology that goes into phylogenetic studies. For the most part the methodology resembles collecting DNA data through PCR, then bayesian analysis is run using MrBayes. Can you explain to me the process of choosing primers for use in PCR? Can you explain what and how data is inputted into MrBayes? Would you or anyone you may know possibly be interested in assisting me with my research in the phylogeny of squamates?
A letter in Anole Annals’ inbox. Can anyone help?: