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.
Liam Revell has kindly pointed out this awesome song from the Puerto Rican children’s show Atencion Atencion.
Here’s Liam’s translation:
“Un lagartijo se metió en la cueva,
de pronto asomó la cabeza,
miró para un lado y al otro,
y que pasó, y que pasó…”
In English:
“An anole went into the cave,
suddenly he poked out his head,
he looked to one side and the other,
and what happened, and what happened…”
Heidi Fagerberg, a children’s book writer, is in the middle of writing a book featuring the green anole of St. Kitts. Photos below. Can anyone confirm that these are Anolis bimaculatus? More importantly, does anyone know about their color-changing abilities and proclivities? Under what conditions does color change occur?
One of our favorite topics here at Anole Annals is adaptive radiation. Don’t believe me? Just type adaptive radiation into the search bar on the right and see all the interesting posts that come up. And why shouldn’t we be interested in AR? After all, anoles are one the great examples of the phenomenon.
So, it seems relevant to notice that two new review papers just appeared on the topic, both of which mention anoles at least in passing. Tom Givnish, in a paper in New Phytologist stemming from a conference on plant radiations last year, provides the most convincing analysis to date about why the term “adaptive radiation” should be reserved for clades that have diversified to occupy a wide range of ecological niches, regardless of how fast they have done so and how many species the clade contains (title of paper: Adaptive radiation versus ‘radiation’ and ‘explosive diversification’: why conceptual distinctions are fundamental to understanding evolution).
Some pithy quotes encapsulate his points:
“Of the early writers on adaptive radiation (Osborn, 1902; Huxley, 1942; Lack, 1947; Simpson, 1953; Carlquist, 1965; Mayr, 1970; Stebbins, 1974), only Simpson included what we might term explosive speciation in his concept of the process.”
“Definitions of adaptive radiation that require accelerations of species diversification relative to sister groups will thus fail to identify Darwin’s finches and Brocchinia as adaptive radiations; excluding such iconic examples of adaptive radiation makes such diversification-based definitions untenable.”
“Why should we care about this distinction? Nothing could be more pointless than a pedantic debate about definitions that goes nowhere. I would argue, however, that making a distinction between adaptive radiation and explosive diversification is fundamental to understanding evolution, and that failure to make such distinctions can blur such understanding and hinder progress.”
Givnish goes on to suggest that “we might consider re-defining adaptive radiation as ‘the rise of a diversity of ecological roles and associated adaptations within a lineage, accompanied by an unusually high level or rate of accumulation of morphological/physiological/behavioral disparity and ecological divergence compared with sister taxa or groups with similar body plans and life histories.’ Such a definition would retain traditional components of adaptive radiation, while suggesting a way forward that includes tempo, not in species diversification, but in the rate of accumulation of disparity.”
Meanwhile, Soulebeau et al., in a new “Forum Paper” in Organisms Diversity & Evolution, conduct a review of the use of the term “adaptive radiation” in the period of 2003-2012 (title: The hypothesis of adaptive radiation in evolutionary biology: hard facts about a hazy concept). Givnish would say that it is hard to draw conclusions from a meta-analysis that lumps different concepts all under one name, but the review does show some patterns in how research is trending. If nothing else, the number of papers purporting to study adaptive radiation doubled over the time period. Moreover, the paper makes an important point that the number of studies that investigate whether adaptive evolution has occurred in a putative adaptive radiation is very low.
The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco has just opened a new exhibit, The Color of Life. You can read more about it at their website. Naturally, anoles played a prominent role in the exhibit, as the panel above attests. The small print says: “Anole lizards regularly advertise their ownership of their territories. They bob their heads and extend a colorful flap of skin called a dewlap, just in case another male is watching.”
Notably, the anole gets much more prominent billing than frogs, which are relegated to a panel further back in the exhibit, as the photo to the right illustrates. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Cal Acad Herpetology Curator Dave Blackburn has just inked a deal to move to the University of Florida where, sources say, he will not only become the Curator of Herpetology at the UF Museum of Natural History, but will also switch his research program from frogs to the local anoles. A wise move, indeed, and we look forward to his further explanation in the Comments section.
Anolis maynardi–doing just fine alongside brown anoles on Little Cayman
Two days ago, Ambika Kamath posted an entry in which she observed that the green anoles in her study site in Gainesville are doing just fine, they’re just high up in the trees and harder to spot than the abundant browns. She concluded that, contrary to what many think, brown anoles are not threatening greens in Florida with extinction.
I’d like to add to Ambika’s conclusion by pointing out how browns and greens interact throughout the natural range. Both species evolved in Cuba. There members of the sagrei group coexist widely with carolinensis’s relatives. Where they co-occur, brown anoles are very abundant and are found on the ground and low in vegetation. Greens, primarily A. allisoni and A. porcatus are seemingly less abundant (population estimates are not available) and they occur on tree trunks on up into the canopy.
This mostly peaceful coexistence is repeated in other places the two species co-occur. In the Bahamas, it’s A. smaragdinus and A. sagrei, on Little Cayman, it’s A. maynardi and A. sagrei. In both cases, sagrei is apparently much more abundant, and the two species occupy different parts of the habitat.
Some time ago (possibly several million years, according to genetic data), green anoles colonized Florida from Cuba. In the absence of browns, the greens took the arboreal to increase their habitat use, a phenomenon termed “ecological release.” Then the browns arrived, thanks to us. They have moved into their ancestral niche and the ancient order has been restored. Greens have moved back up in the trees and, yes, their populations are probably now smaller, because some of the resources they were using are now taken by browns. But they’re not going extinct. Greens and browns stably coexist throughout their range. That’s what they’ll do in Florida, too, as long as all the trees aren’t cut down for shopping malls and parking lots.
Battling brown anoles. Photo by Karen Cusick
Over on Daffodil’s Photo Blog, Karen Cusick has documented a knock-down, drag out fight between two brown anoles (which we have elsewhere suggested should be re-branded as “festive” anoles). Check out the dorsal and nuchal crests!
And you’ll never guess what happened next! Something that I’ve never experienced in all my years. But I don’t know how to paste a video from Twitter into WordPress, so you’ll have to go to casa martin’s Twitter page to find out.
People pay a lot of attention to the color of a anole’s dewlap, but it’s often forgotten that the perceived color of the dewlap is not just a function of the light that reflects off of it, but also the light that at least sometimes shines through it!
These are two views of the brown anole taken minutes apart from opposite sides of the tree (the lizard was in the same spot, the photographer (me) moved.
For more on this topic, see what Manuel Leal had to say a while back on Chipojolab.
Photo by Jill Davidson-Guillen.
Jill Davidson-Guillen of Boca Raton, Florida, had an unexpected guest when she went swimming in her backyard pool last week. She said that she routinely finds curly-tailed lizards in the pool, but this was the first knight anole.
Ms. Ann-Ole thanks local herpetologists. From the Wild Amelia Facebook Page: Many thanks to herpetologists Mark Beshel (far left) and Caleb Bress (far right) of the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens for their entertaining and informative presentation on the green anole at the last of the Wild Nites this Festival year. Who knew the green anole could be sooo much fun? Thanks also to our own Ms-Ann-ole! Photo–Scott Moore
The just completed Wild Amelia Nature Festival this year featured the green anole as its mascot. AA‘s friend, anole author Karen Cusick, attended and filed this report:
“The Wild Amelia Facebook page has photos and some info on a lot of the activities–releasing sea turtles, ecotours on foot, by kayak, and by segway, learning about bats with the Bat Lady, sunrise yoga on the beach, etc., so I hope that helped.
Although the green anole was the Critter of the Year, the main things specifically related to green anoles were: the green anole presentation by the people from the zoo (along with the person in the anole suit); a couple of booths at the expo that featured some pictures and books about anoles and other lizards; the kids’ activity where they got prizes for going around answering questions about anoles; and the festival tee shirts with the anole logo. I noticed that the person in the anole costume was also on hand to congratulate two children for becoming Seashore Junior Naturalists.”
Karen also nabbed two photography awards for the photos below. Congratulations, Karen!
Award-winning photo by Karen Cusick. First place in “Other Fauna” category for non-professional photographers.
Another award-winning photo by Karen Cusick. First place in “Bird” category
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