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.
A cobra in the Caribbean? No, the Hispaniolan brown racer, Haitiophis anomalus. As AA contributor Miguel Landestoy reports in the September issue of IRCF Amphibians & Reptiles, more than half of all prey consumed by these snakes were anoles (Miguel: which species?). The article is a comprehensive overview of the natural history of this little known species, including much data newly collected by the author.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get better, it has: a grass-bush anole has been added to the original four ecomorph wristwatches. The watch features a Puerto Rican Anolis pulchellus from a beautiful photograph kindly provided by Manuel Leal. Check it out along with the other four ecomorph watches at zazzle.com.
And if you order by 9 p.m. eastern time today, it’s 31% off! Use this code: HALLOWEENDAY
Apparently they can, as they graph above indicates: Captive brown anoles tilt their heads more when the call of a kestrel or hawk is played compared to their response to calls from a variety of more benign feathers. These results come from a study on 32 captive brown anoles conducted by Cantwell and Forrest and published recently in the Journal of Herpetology. We’ve had a bit of discussion on the hearing ability of anoles–we tend to focus on anole visual capability, but its clear that they can hear and thus the role of auditory capabilities in the lives of anoles deserves more study (as do their vocalizations).
Green Anoles in La-La Land! Greg Pauly at the Los Angeles County Museum confirms that they are well-established in Hancock Park, a large park that includes the La Brea Tar Pits and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Invasive species are no laughing matter, but surely we can make an exception for an anole in LA. Jokes, anyone? Thanks to AA commenter Don Lyman for bringing this to our attention.
Greg Pauly and Left Coast anole
I’ve just finished reading The Symbol, the spectacular new book by Dappen, Losin, and Pérez-Mellado on the Ibiza wall Lizard, Podarcis pityusensis. We’ve already discussed in these pages the exploits of the first two authors, Ph.D.’s-turned-filmmakers who have already produced some exceptional science documentaries, most with a lizard focus. And we helped advertise their ultimately successful effort to crowd-source funding for their trip to the Pityusic Archipelago to produce the book. As a result, we saw the spectacular photos and videos they posted along the way, as the project was in progress. For all of these reasons, we had high expectations for the ensuing volume.
And now The Symbol has arrived, and our expectations have been vastly exceeded. In a word, the book is fabulous, or should we say “fabuloso, fabelhaft, favoloso” because the book is simultaneously written in English, Spanish, German and Italian? At first pass, what grabs attention are the photographs, which are amazing. Of course, with a resplendent species like Podarcis pityusensis to work with, the Day’s Edge team had good material with which to work, but they’ve made the most of it. The photos are lustrous, exquisite, sharp and beautifully framed.
But what was so unexpected is the fascinating evolutionary pageant put on by these lizards. We had no idea that they were so extraordinarily diverse, exhibiting dramatically different colors manifest over small geographic distances.
Check out the geographic distribution of the different color forms, 23 of which are recognized as distinct subspecies. Truly extraordinary.
The authors comprehensively review the natural history and evolutionary diversity of these lizards, explaining in a way that will be captivating to a general audience. Ibiza is a world-renowned tourist destination, and the Ibizans love their local lizards, so this book will no doubt be of great value to locals and tourists alike, and doubtless will educate a wide audience.
Yet, the book also holds value to the seasoned herpetologist. The discussion of the biology of this species is thorough and first-rate, and the photos capture in unusually vivid detail many important aspects of their ecology and behavior.
Anole biologists, the challenge has been thrown down. Dappen and colleagues have shown what a fabulous book looks like. Our lizards are equally enticing and photogenic–let’s see a book on a Caribbean anole!
Olivier Testa, a french speleologist in Port-au-Prince, just returned from a five week speleological expedition in the area, where the team recorded more than 80 shafts and encountered this anole at the bottom of one. There’s a video, too. Anyone know what it is?
Last year’s winner, Anolis allisoni by Steven De Decker and Tess Driessens
We’ve gotten a fabulous set of entries already, but rumor has is that there still might be room for an even better one. So get your photos entered before the end-of-the-month deadline. And don’t forget the grand prize: a spiffy Anolis watch of the ecomorph of your choice! Enter today!
The rules: please submit photos (as many as you’d like) as attachments to anoleannals@gmail.com. To ensure that submissions with large attachments arrive, it’s a good idea to send an accompanying e-mail without any attachments that seeks confirmation of the photo’s receipt. Photos must be at least 150 dpi and print to a size of 11 x 17 inches. If you do not have experience resizing and color-correcting your images, the simplest thing to do is to submit the raw image files produced by your digital camera (or, for the luddites, a high quality digital scan of a printed image). If you elect to alter your own images, don’t forget that its always better to resize than to resample. Images with watermarks or other digital alterations that extend beyond color correction, sharpening and other basic editing will not be accepted. We are not going to deal with formal copyright law and ask only your permission to use your image for the calendar and related content on Anole Annals. We, in turn, agree that your images will never be used without attribution and that we will not profit financially from their use (nobody is going to make any money from the sale of these calendars because they’ll be available directly from the vendor).
Please provide a short description of the photo that includes: (1) the species name, (2) the location where the photo was taken, and (3) any other relevant information. Twelve winning photos will be selected by readers of Anole Annals from a set of 28 finalists chosen by the editors of Anole Annals. The grand prize winning and runner-up photos will be chosen by a panel of anole photography experts. Deadline for submission is November 1, 2013.
A conference on the fauna and flora of the “Petite Antilles” was held in Martinique in 2010 and the resulting conference volume has just appeared and is downloadable. The papers are many and varied, covering all manner of organism and topics spanning a wide range of topics. I’d give a full report on the papers, but…most are in French. Of most interest to our audience is a paper from Roger Thorpe’s reporting further studies on contact zones between divergent A. roquet lineages on Martinique (we previously discussed what was formerly their most recent study). In addition, the Bobs Powell and Henderson, along with Gad Perry and others, have a paper on introduced species of the Lesser Ants, Michel Breuil has one on sphaeros, and there are a number of others of interest. The full Table of Contents is below.
The egg-laying biology of anoles is surprisingly little studied. Where do they lay their eggs? How often? Inquiring minds needs to know. And now a team of Japanese scientists led by Mitsuhido Toda has taken a small step to answer these questions.
Working with green anoles introduced to islands near Japan, the researchers brought ten females into the lab, amply fed and watered them, and saw where and how often they laid eggs. The lizards were brought into the lab in April and the first egg was laid in late May. Egg production increased until a peak in mid-August and ended in late October. Over the course of the season, females laid an average of 13.7 eggs. At the peak in August, females were averaging almost an egg a week.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the study was the cage in which the females were kept, which had a variety of available sites, including a potted fern and pots with wet and dry soil all at ground level, and another set of pots at a meter. Females strongly preferred the low-down pots to the high ones, and the pots with the ferns to those without. Among eggs laid in fern-less pots, all were in the wet soil and none in the dry soil. In the pots with ferns, eggs were often laid in the cup-shaped part of the plant in the center of the pot or between the eggs; eggs laid in the soil were from 0-50 mm below the surface, averaging 17 mm deep.
This research is part of a greater effort to learn the natural history of the green anole so as to eradicate it from the Japanese islands, where it is apparently having a devastating effect on the endemic insect fauna [1,2]. The researchers suggest that eradication efforts may be most useful in April, before the egg-laying season begins, and also suggest the development of artificial egg-laying sites, from which eggs can be harvested before they hatch.
Anole Annals is very sorry to learn of the passing of AA contributor Chad Watkins. Chad, a graduate student at the University of Texas-Arlington , was killed in a car crash October 8th in Dallas. Chad’s research was on the occurrence of transposable elements in Hox genes in Anolis carolinensis. We reported on his fascinating talk on this topic at the 2011 Evolution meetings, and Chad himself posted on some eggs that survived freezing in an incubator mishap. Rest in peace, Chad Watkins.
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