Author: Jonathan Losos Page 52 of 129

Photo by Luis Diaz.

The ninth most viewed page of Anole Annals of all time is dedicated to this beauty, a member of the Anolis equestris species complex. That post referred to a PDF version of a poster with photos of some reptiles and amphibians of Cuba. Luis Diaz, Curator of Herpetology at Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Cuba, recently commented on the beautiful photo above that was in that poster and posted on AA:

I’m the author of two of the pictures you posted a long time ago on Anole Annals. At the moment the pdf you mentioned was published, only one subspecies of Blue Giant Anole existed (A. e. potior). Now populations in Cayo Coco (like the individual shown in the picture), are considered Anolis equestris cyaneus, not potior as mentioned in the referred photographic guide. We named Anolis equestris equestris the individual with a large black blotch on the neck (actually from Peralta, Zapata Swamp, a bit far away from Playa Larga), but it has the coloration of A. e. calceus. However, we have new genetic evidences (information obtained during a joined project with Antonio Cadiz, University of Havana, and Masakado Kawata from the University of Tohoku) for the taxonomic re-assessment of Cuban giant anole species and subspecies. We are working in a soon coming review of this group. I’m very interested in the photograph linked as: http://www.pbase.com/image/100014648. This is a really diverse and complicated group of anoles.

Dr. Luis M. Diaz
Curator of Herpetology
Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Cuba

Green anole chowing down on a smaller brown. Photo from Tim’s Fertile Turtles.

Tim Mitchell from Iowa State University reports a great observation of a green anole eating a brown anole. There’s even a video!

The website actually has a whole bunch of blog posts about Tim’s research project. Check it out!

Note: we’ve actually featured this video before with a description of the project from a different website, but it’s so cool, it’s worth posting again!

We all know that much of the natural world is being destroyed, fragmented, and altered by man’s activities. In many cases, the survival of species will depend on their ability to live in these human-transformed habitats. The field of “countryside ecology” has developed in recent years to investigate just how much diversity can be maintained in such habitats and to identify the factors that are most important in maximizing this diversity.

In a recent paper in Ecology, Mendenhall et al. look at the area surrounding the Organization of Tropical Studies’ Las Cruces Field Station. As in many areas in Costa Rica and elsewhere, much of the landscape has been changed to pastures and coffee plantations. Surprisingly, however, there are lots of little bits of forests meandering through these disturbed areas.

The authors find that a reasonably large amount of the species diversity of herps is maintained in these areas. In addition, the forest fragments turn out to be crucial for much of this diversity. Why these fragments are maintained is not known by the authors and an important area for further inquiry.

And what about the anoles? Anolis polylepis was the single most common herp in the area. As the chart below shows, the extent to which anoles are found in disturbed areas varies by species, not surprising given the differences in ecology of the species.

Not shown on the graph are several other anoles seen in lower numbers, specifically four A. biporcatus (two in pasture, two in coffee plantation) and nine A. woodi (four in the forest reserve, five in the forest fragments).

Here’s the paper’s abstract:

The future of biodiversity and ecosystem services depends largely on the capacity of human-dominated ecosystems to support them, yet this capacity remains largely unknown. Using the framework of countryside biogeography, and working in the Las Cruces system of Coto Brus, Costa Rica, we assessed reptile and amphibian assemblages within four habitats that typify much of the Neotropics: sun coffee plantations (12 sites), pasture (12 sites), remnant forest elements (12 sites), and a larger, contiguous protected forest (3 sites in one forest). Through analysis of 1678 captures of 67 species, we draw four primary conclusions. First, we found that the majority of reptile (60%) and amphibian (70%) species in this study used an array of habitat types, including coffee plantations and actively grazed pastures. Second, we found that coffee plantations and pastures hosted rich, albeit different and less dense, reptile and amphibian biodiversity relative to the 326-ha Las Cruces Forest Reserve and neighboring forest elements. Third, we found that the small ribbons of ‘‘countryside forest elements’’ weaving through farmland collectively increased the effective size of a 326-ha local forest reserve 16-fold for reptiles and 14-fold for amphibians within our 236-km2 study area. Therefore, countryside forest elements, often too small for most remote sensing techniques to identify, are contributing; 95% of the available habitat for forest-dependent reptiles and amphibians in our largely human-dominated study region. Fourth, we found large and pond-reproducing amphibians to prefer human-made habitats, whereas small, stream-reproducing, and directly developing species are more dependent on forest elements. Our investigation demonstrates that tropical farming landscapes can support substantial reptile and amphibian biodiversity. Our approach provides a framework for estimating the conservation value of the complex working landscapes that constitute roughly half of the global land surface, and which are experiencing intensification pressure worldwide.

Brown and green anole on South Padre Island. © Dave Welling

Here’s a marvelous photo of something I’ve never seen before. Nature photographer Dave Welling, who has some fabulous shots of anoles and other wildlife (don’t miss the rattlesnake striking the green jay), describes how he was “just photographing birds one day on South Padre Island and found a green anole. He started displaying on the tree branch when a brown anole approached from another direction. They both decided to see whose dewlap was bigger and they spent about 10 minutes moving around each other and displaying. Quite a sight and I too have never seen it before or since.”

That’s no viper

If there’s one thing we like here at AA, it’s convergent evolution (e.g., 1,2), so we’re always delighted to learn of new examples. Thus, we were delighted to read the recent report on convergence between Australian and North American snake faunas, written by Grundler and Rabosky and now available online at Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Australia is famous for being the only continent on which venomous snakes outnumber non-venomous ones. That is the result of radiation of a single clade of elapid snakes, known as the oxyuranines. It has long been noted that some oxyuranines seem convergent on counterparts elsewhere, such as the death adder, which looks and acts much like a heavy-bodied viper (photo above).

Grundler and Rabosky set out to test this idea of convergence more quantitatively, specifically asking whether the Australian radiation as a whole was more statistically similar to North American snakes than one might expect by chance. That is, does the convergence extend beyond a few pairs of species to encompass the entire radiation–is the radiation-wide degree of convergence greater than one would expect by chance? Alert readers will recall that this is the same question that Mahler et al. recently asked about Greater Antillean anoles, and Grundler and Rabosky used some of the new techniques presented in Mahler et al.

And the results, in a nutshell, are positive. Not only are there many cases of convergence (see figure below), but the overall amount of convergence is statistically significant. This can be seen in two analyses. First, for Australian snakes, the nearest morphological neighbor in North America is more similar than one would expect by chance. Second, Australian elapids have diverged to occupy 10 phenotypic peaks in morphological space, and seven of these are occupied by North American snakes as well.

The paper has three interesting twists:

1. Despite the great convergence in morphology, North American and Australian snakes are not convergent in diet. In particular, the Aussies eat a lot of lizards and snakes, and insect-eating is much more prevalent in North America.

2. There has been speculation in some quarters that replicate adaptive radiation is an island phenomenon, but this study shows that it can occur between mainland faunas as well.

3. Moreover, the convergence spans multiple lineages. Although the oxyuranines are a single radiation in Australia, their counterparts in North America belong to five different colubroid lineages (not that this analysis was restricted to colubroids, which include the great majority of snakes).

I think it’s safe to conclude that snakes aren’t quite as cool as anoles, but they’re getting there.

Battling female Anolis gundlachi. Photo by Ellee Cook.

Territorial behavior in anoles has been extensively studied, but mostly between the males. Yet, females engage in all kinds of aggressive interactions and seem to have territorities. What are the similarities and differences between their behavior and what males do?

Ellee Cook is studying just that in Puerto Rico, focusing on A. gundlachi. She’s in the field right now and has just filed a report on Chipojolab. Among other things, she witnessed a drag-down, knock-down fight, pictured above.

Of course, we’re all waiting to know–is this what females use their dewlaps for?

A blessed arrival. How often do females lay their eggs? Information needed!

We’ve previously reported on a study of seasonal population  reproductive cycles of female A. cristatellus from adjacent shade-dwelling and open-sunny sites being conducted by Luisa Otero, Ray Huey and George Gorman. George writes in to say that they “would appreciate ANY information on egg laying intervals for individual female anoles [of any species] either from captive breeding programs or from field studies. If published,  references are appreciated. If unpublished, access to your data is doubly appreciated. Obviously, if there exist ancillary data on temperature regimes of the egg depositors, that would be even more wonderful.”

Please respond as a comment or write George directly.

Writing in response to an AA post on declining green anole populations, AA reader Ann V. suggests that crazy ants are the cause:

“Here in Bryan, Tx I have noticed a severe decline in anoles in my normally anole-filled yard. I saw them earlier in the summer (in May), but they have all but disappeared now (and I have been actively searching for them). My yard receives a lot of water and even during past droughts, I still had plenty of anoles. I have also noticed two other things. My fire ants are disappearing, but I do now see the raspberry “crazy ants.” I was wondering if the appearance of the highly invasive crazy ants might be a reason why my anoles are gone? (I know they do affect  number of fire ants).  Has anyone else noticed this correlation?”

Photos by Robin Moore that appeared on CNN.com and are on his website.

We’ve previously discussed the threats to Jamaica’s biodiversity, herpetological front and center, but now a CNN opinion piece has brought the issue to the public at large. The article is written by Wendy Townsend who, according to CNN “writes for children and young adults, and she and her family raise lizards as pets. Her third novel, “Blue Iguana,” has just been released by namelos.”

Townsend’s op-ed appears to be based on a fantastic set of posts, videos and photos by conservationist Robin Moore. I highly recommend you check those out at robinmoore.com.

Here’s what Townsend has to say:

“Kenroy Williams, also known as “Booms,” is “Guardian of the Reptiles” in Hellshire, located near the Goat Islands in Jamaica. The region is centered in the Portland Bight Protected Area, an area of ocean and land set apart in 1999 to protect its rich biodiversity of birds, reptiles, plants, trees and marine life.

But now, the Jamaican government is preparing to sell the Goat Islands to the China Harbour Engineering Co. to build a megafreighter seaport and industrial park. China Harbour is part of a conglomerate blacklisted by the World Bank under its Fraud and Corruption Sanctioning Policy.

“They’re destroying what should be preserved,” says Booms, who has been working to protect exceedingly rare reptiles in the area for seven years, including the critically endangered Jamaican iguana.

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Photo by Bob Trivers

Bob Trivers is renowned as one of the most important theorists in the history of evolutionary biology. Less well known, however, is undoubtedly his most important work, on the mating behavior of Anolis lizards. Seriously, his 1976 Evolution paper showing size-assortative mating in the beautiful A. garmani of Jamaica was an important demonstration of sexual selection back in the days before its prevalence was widely appreciated, and his book chapter in the Ernest Williams festschrift on A. valencienni is also a classic*. (note: most of Trivers’ papers can be found on his website)

Bob is currently back in Jamaica and is keeping an eye on the green guanas, as they’re called. He reports:

“Here is the largest male on my property copulating for 34 minutes—impervious to my camera—with a long, slender—dare I say?—attractive female but here is the kicker, two hours earlier he had copulated with another female and so far as I can tell, he used his left hemipenis on the first and the right one on the second.”

Several days later, the same fellow was up to it again: “didn’t think i could get any closer to the monster male, did you? Watched the whole courtship from a distance of several trees and 20 yards; she stayed posing the whole time—beautiful sight—with her whole body off the substrate except the tip of her tail raised in a captivating arc; she never moved once as he traversed the distance dewlap-ing and head-bobbing—she head bobbing sometimes as well.”

Photo by Bob Trivers

Note that the big fella’ has switched sides again, using his left hemipenis this time.

And on the subject of hempenial switching, here’s a summary of what we know about that, from Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree (footnote 174, p.137):

Anoles (at least A. carolinensis and A. sagrei, the only species so studied) alternate the use of hemipenes. Each hemipenis is connected to its own testis. If prevented from using one hemipenis (by placing tape over one side of the cloaca), the male transfers significantly fewer sperm when it continually reuses the same hemipenis (Tokarz, 1988; Tokarz and Slowinski, 1990).”

* Hicks, R.A., and R.L. Trivers. 1983. The social behavior of Anolis valencienni. Pp. 570–595 in A.G.J. Rhodin and K. Miyata, Eds., Advances in Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology: Essays in Honor of Ernest E. Williams. Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University: Cambridge, MA.