As Martha Muñoz reported two months ago, the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology meetings, beginning Thursday in San Francisco, will be awash with anole research. Check out the list of talks here, the full story in Martha’s post, and stay tuned for updates from ‘frisco.
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 83 of 130
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.
Recently we posted the Poe lab’s guide to the hyperdiverse anole community of El Cope, Panama, which harbors 12 anole species. Only slightly less diverse is the community of anoles at Rio Palenque, Ecuador, which has 11 species, and the Poe team has put together a guide for this locality as well. A small version appears below, and the full size pdf can be accessed here.
Just found this on Twitter. http://t.co/tHk3ZQBN
People often stop me on the street to ask “how do you come up with so many great topics to post on?” The answer I give is one simple word: “Twitter.” If you want to stay on top of the anole world, there’s no better way than to see what Anole Nation is tweeting. Try it yourself and you’ll see that most new anole papers get mentioned, as well as news of all sorts, and all kinds of great photos and other anolillenea.
And other great stuff, too, like this great curse: “I hope you accidentally swallow an anole and choke on it.” As well as many touching human interest stories, such as this one: “Good Christ! I just went to get the mail from the box and a stupid Knight Anole lizard over a foot long jumped on my arm before bolting.”
How do I do it? I simply search on “anole” and “anolis”. There are some drawbacks, though. For example, it seems a lot of people don’t know how to spell “alone” or–I’m guessing here–“ahole”. So a bunch of the tweets don’t make a lot of sense. And how could I forget? All the tweets about the comic book character Anole, who’s exploits seem to be drawing an ever greater audience (as befits the world’s first gay superhero).
Detour on the information superhighway
And then there’s the bane of my twitter-life: some Japanese tweeters have incorporated “anole” or “anolis” into their twitternames, so periodically there’s a flood of banal tweets in Japanese to scroll through (ok, you got me, I don’t really know that they’re banal because, after all, they’re in Japanese–who knows, maybe they are important insights on anole taxonomy and biogeography). Plus, recently a dude named Ben with his address at “@anole” has started tweeting a ton of irrelevancies.
And, of course, there is some information that you’d rather not know about, like the oft-retweeted link to a disgusting video of a teenager biting a live anole in half and eating it.
It’s a brave new cyberworld out there, but if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of the ever changing anolosphere, Twitter’s the way to go. Unless there’s some new thing that’s better.
The 2013 Anole Annals Anole Calendar has been flying off the shelves, but a few remain, and for those of you savvy shoppers who’ve waited until after Christmas, now’s the time: Zazzle is offering 65% off through Friday. Never too late for a late holiday present! The order page is here; use the Discount code: GIFTSYOUWANT. Get yours before they’re all gone!
The ReptileDatabase, an online listing of all species of reptiles, has just issued its latest update (Dec.24), and in it, has broken Anolis into eight genera following Nicholson et al.’s recent paper. Here’s what they have to say:
“Since the last database release 493 names have been added or have changed, including 62 new species, and 95 other changes such as elevations of subspecies to species status, resurrections, or simply changes in gender. The remaining 336 changes are changed Anolis names.
Anolis revision: The most notable change affected Anolis. We have preliminarily adopted the new Anolis names from Nicholson et al. (2012), even though these changes remain controversial. These authors split Anolis into 8 genera, among which Anolis now holds only 52 species. While this is phylogenetically more informative than a single large genus Anolis, it is unfortunately of limited use, if not confusing, due to unsatisfactory diagnoses of at least some of these new genera.”
Those of you who are long time readers of Anole Annals will remember our lengthy discussion of this proposed change earlier this fall. Readers interested in reliving the discussion might search using the term “Nicholson” to find the many posts on the topic.
The Reptile Database is relied upon by many online resources as the authoritative list of reptile species. As such, this decision will go far to gain widespread acceptance of this taxonomic revision. On the other hand, at least two papers are currently in press criticizing the paper and arguing against this taxonomic split. Stay tuned!
Artwork by Ryane Logsdon.
If you’re like me, you can’t get enough anole videos. So, what a surprise it was to learn that Cornell’s fabled Lab of O has a repository of 147 anole videos. Many of them are from Cuba, taken by Eric Liner, and include footage of Chamaeleolis, A. smallwoodi, and other cool Cubans. I haven’t checked most of them out yet, but it seems like a great resource.
Eric Enrique Flores de Gracia, a Panamanian graduate student based in the UK, sends in the following. Can anyone help?:
Besides my own Ph.D. research focus, I like to explore and monitor biodiversity of amphibians and reptiles among others, in the central mountains of Panama (part of the Talamanca eco-region). During a field campaign in the buffer zone of the Santa Fe National Park, we found a curious lizard on a Nispero (Terminalia amazonica) tree. Sadly, we were running out of time and only took the attached picture and since our main focus was not to survey herps at that moment, we released the lizard. I will appreciate if you have any clue as to what species it could be? By the way, we started a small monitoring program in 2011 in a never before explored area with some students from the University in Veraguas province.
Steve Poe writes: “Several island sites are famous among anolologists for harboring multiple sympatric species. Soroa in Cuba, La Palma in the Dominican Republic, and El Yunque in Puerto Rico each have been well-studied by community ecologists. But many mainland sites are populated by anole communities that meet or exceed the diversity levels of these island sites. One such hyperdiverse mainland locality is El Cope in Panama. Twelve species of Anolis may be collected within 100 meters of the field house at El Cope.
Identification of mainland anoles can be difficult as there are fewer resources available relative to those for anoles in the Caribbean. We have produced two-panel powerpoint guides for El Cope that should aid in identification of anoles in and around these sites.”
Small versions are attached below and the full size version can be accessed here (be patient on the download–it’s a big file).
