Green anole at the window. Listening to violin?

Dr. Phillip Smith of Georgia wrote to Anole Annals:

“For the past several days one of my anole friends has appeared at my back door windows at about 12:30 PM.  I have studied and played violin as a pastime since about 1947, and play a bit every day. I had happened to choose that time on the first day and after a few minutes my attention was drawn to this little guy poking his nose farther and farther in a jabbing way into the window as he “moon-walked” along the side of each pane.  He had glided down to the bottom of the door window when I really began to watch, and it was so in synch with the music that I kept playing for a bit.  

He kept up his activity, sometimes appearing almost completely, always making a rocking, jabbing movement with his body, gradually moving to his right and the other side of the window.  When he got there he really took off upward with his head always extending onto the glass and “slid” to nearly the top of the door, then gradually worked back down.  By then I had been watching for several minutes, and realized this was no accident (or at least so I projected).  

I got my iPhone and began to try to capture his activity.  Of course this meant the music stopped, and the activity diminished pretty quickly.  When this became obvious I hustled back to my violin and began to play.  Within a very short time he was back at it, and he stayed for at least a half hour.

The door opens on a small slab, about ten feet square as is common in condos, with grass around its two sides and a shed along the left side.  I have quite a few large potted plants including a nine-foot yellow pine and a climbing rose on my back fence, many of which have been there for years.  The eave overhangs the back wall and door until about 1:30 at this time of year, so is shaded when he comes, and he has come for several days in a row, always with similar interaction.  I don’t even know how or what anoles (If he is indeed one) hear and was a little surprised he could hear through the glass, but then it occurred to me he might be sensing the vibration through his feet.  

I am a retired physician and very interested in this phenomenon, and experienced enough in scientific literature to know it would take me “forever” to ferret out information truly relevant to this interaction and my little friend, which is why I thought to contact you in this way.”

Dr. Smith then provided two videos, which he describes (see videos at bottom):

“The “screen” for the interaction is a French door with five apparent panes of glass, facing due west with a shading, overhanging eave above it, which becomes sun-exposed at about 2:20 PM.  The videos and photos were all taken in the period after 11 AM, when the anole appeared only once—all other “visits” were between 12:50 and 1:30.  

Sadly the reason the anole attracted my attention on the first interaction was that he/she moved very actively around the lower 1/3 of the door glass frequently making jabbing, bobbing up and down movements along the bottom and once “moon-walking” almost all the way up the left side and back down.  These movements were almost continuous for more than 30 minutes, and did not suggest hunting.  But because I could not photograph this and play the music at the same time, and I had not previously used the “selfie stick” I had, the later videos don’t show much of this.  

There are periods of activity and some fairly long periods of simply “freezing” in place, sometimes off the edge of the glass out of view.  

In the longer video I couldn’t get both the very top and bottom of the glass in the frame where I could anchor the camera stand, and the anole really doesn’t appear until just after 5 minutes.  From the start his primary attention seems to be the insect life on the outside of the door.  He moves up and down the right side of the glass often looking toward the middle of the door and from time to time scratching his head with his back foot (I think usually his left) as @ 16 minutes 59 seconds.  

There is a fairly active section from 23:30 to the end of this video, especially a dart downward to nail a bug @ 27:09.

The overall impression of the 11 and a half minute video is similar. The anole is present from the beginning with movements up and down from one pane to another, and his intent seems to be to get something to eat.  

I don’t think there is a particularly convincing relation of his movements to the music in either of these.”

Photo from http://www.petworldshop.com/

Nigel Rothfels, a historian of animals and culture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, asks:

Given the previous AA post on anoles in the pet trade, the amount of in-country breeding there must be of anoles, the general life-span of anoles, and the general growth in pet-keeping since Covid, what is your highly educated guess on the number of anoles currently being kept in captivity world-wide (as pets, for educational supply companies, in labs, or zoos).  With 350,000/year being collected in just Louisiana in 2006, it makes me think that something like 3-5 million might still be an underestimate.

Anyone want to venture an estimate?

Bob Trivers published his memoirs, Wild Life, six years ago. We discussed it in these pages and pointed to a favorable book review that appeared in Current Biology, a review with which I agree completely, not surpisingly, since I wrote it.

I commend the book to you, but if you want the short story, check out Trivers’ two-page summary of his life from age 13 to 29 just published in Evolutionary Psychology. The abstract is a good indication of what the short paper holds: “This is a brief history of my intellectual life from age 13 to 29 years—and beyond. It encompasses mathematics, US history, and evolutionary biology, especially social theory based on natural selection.”

This site has all kinds of useful information! Here’s the site’s story (“about us”):

Our Story

Esri created the Caribbean GeoPortal Program to support an open mapping community across the Caribbean. As a global company, Esri’s distributors and employees have been working across the countries and territories in the Caribbean for many years.

The Caribbean GeoPortal is a comprehensive cloud-based platform that is focused on advancing three main goals for the region:

• increasing the capacity of organizations in the region through GIS training and education
• improving collaboration and information sharing among organizations in the region
• providing organizations in the region with the necessary GIS capabilities to support their work

From the pages of the Gainesville Sun , referring to a recent paper in Oecologia.

From April to September of 2017, Jesse Borden was climbing trees and counting lizards around Alachua County.

Sometimes, he could be found in branches on the University of Florida campus or in people’s backyards. Other times, his distinctive red helmet popped in and out of leaves in nearby forests.

The 34-year-old UF student is in his fourth year pursuing a doctoral degree in interdisciplinary ecology, and much of his work has focused on Gainesville’s native green anole lizards and their responses to two threats: development and invasive brown anoles.

He found that in the presence of brown anoles, the green natives moved about 17 times higher in trees, or about 8.3 meters in median perch height, to coexist. But the shift did not allow the lizards to overcome their habitat loss from human development.

These findings were recently published on Oct. 7 in the journal Oecologia.

“The extent to which [green anoles] were shifting was pretty fascinating,” Borden said. “That appears to allow them to coexist with the threat of an invasive species, the brown anole that is competing with it, but it doesn’t make them immune to other effects like urban development. And so it seemed like urbanization was the strongest driver of their decline across the landscape.”

Brown anoles were first introduced to the mainland southeastern U.S. in the early 1900s and were well established by the 1940s, according to the study. In Alachua County, they have been established for decades and appear to thrive in urban environments, Borden said. It is not known exactly how they came to the area, but it could have been via cargo and boats.

To study the green anoles’ response to both development and brown anoles at the same time, he and other helpers surveyed 61 trees and the ground around them for lizards twice each, once per day and once after dark. They then statistically analyzed the data for metrics like abundance, perch height and urbanization.

“It was a lot of fun,” Borden said. “Many thanks to so many kind people who let us use their backyard trees.”

The student said his findings raised many questions and topics for future research, such as how much time the green anoles spend higher in the trees. He is currently working on a project looking at evidence for change in body shape across the urban to natural gradient in lizard species here and change in their temperature tolerance to cold.

For Gainesville residents who miss seeing the little green lizards, Borden said, there are a few things people can do to help bolster their habitat space in the city. Planting native vegetation of varying heights in yard space can benefit the green anoles. Protecting and preserving forest patches and trees also supports them and lots of other wildlife.

“I just hope people are noticing the green anoles,” Borden said. “I find them so beautiful. They’re super cool. They’re a really fun and special part of the southeast U.S. and Florida.”

Contact Borden online via Twitter at @JesseBBorden or Instagram at @borden_ecology_adventures.

Ground-dwelling lizard A. tandai.

From the pages of Natural History magazine.

Ivan Prates

With over 400 species of anoles (Anolis) scattered from Florida to Bolivia, these slen­der lizards, widely sold in pet stores, have long been model subjects in evolutionary biology—keys to ecomorphology, adaptive radiation, and convergent evolution. Yet there is still much to discover about them.

Jonathan Huie, a doctoral candidate at George Washington University, while an intern at the Smithsonian’s National Muse­um of Natural History, set out to determine whether the less-studied anoles of main­land Central and South America have evolved the six ecomorphs—forms adapted to microhabitats, from treetops to trunks to undergrowth—recognized in the much-studied species found on Caribbean islands.

Huie examined 347 anoles preserved in four natural history museums; they represented 205 spe­cies, 99 of them from the mainland clade. He mea­sured thirteen morpho­logical traits associated with habitats and modes of locomotion, including the lengths of tails, bodies, snouts, heads, hands, feet, and limb bones and the width of the toe and finger pads anoles use to cling to vertical surfaces. After averaging these values for each species and correct­ing for body size, he plotted their positions in a multidimensional “morphospace.” He tested their resultant assignments to eco­morphs against available field data.

Mainland anoles were previously consid­ered less ecologically diverse than their Ca­ribbean cousins. But Huie’s findings suggest they occupy all of the same microhabitats; the two groups underwent similar radia­tion—i.e., convergent evolution—over the approximately 30 million years since anoles from the islands recolonized the mainland. He also found evidence of a previously un­recognized ground-dwelling ecomorph in both groups.

Why was this mainland diversity over­looked? Perhaps because it is much easier to study anoles on the islands, which are celebrated evolutionary hotbeds where, with fewer predators, they are more abundant and visible. “Mainland anoles are a lot more secretive and inhabit more complex envi­ronments, such as heavy forest,” Huie noted.

Huie suggests the methods he and his coauthors developed could be applied to study “the relationships between form and function” in other morphological features of organisms, whether plant leaves, frog limbs, or the pharyngeal jaws of fish—especially cichlids, the fast-evolving, highly diverse piscine counterparts of anoles. (Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society)

For more commentary on this paper, see a previous AA post.

Javier Lobon Rovira, a graduate student working on geckos, decided to up his game and pay attention to anoles. Here’s what resulted! The lizards were found on 24th of August in the surroundings of Gainesville, Florida, displaying from a tree branch around one meter high. He found a second specimen close by sleeping at night on a small bush close to a water pond.

Turns out that it happens more commonly than you might think! Here’s the latest report from The Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society, a ferruginous pygmy-owl eating a clouded anole in Mexico.