Says Cabela’s: “the merchandise is out of stock and we will not be getting it in till the spring of next year.”
What is up with these guys? Has every reader of Anole Annals recently ordered 100?
Author: Jonathan Losos Page 99 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.
How else can you explain the fact that no one from either place has ever successfully logged onto Anole Annals? Surely, the populace there has tried, so clearly the governments are blocking us. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Check out the Map App on the right side of the page, which shows every location where someone has logged in (and don’t miss the real time rotating globe version–click on the “3D” link at the top of the page!).
It’s a pretty impressive map. Basically, just about the whole world has logged in. Regularly from the Gulf of Guinea. India, the Middle East, the far North, the Azores, Iceland, four different Hawaiian islands. You name it. Except New Guinea and the Galapagos. Even Madagascar logged on for the first time two days ago (I think they knew they were about to be singled-out). So I implore you, dear AA readers. Get on a plane, fly to those places, and log on. Please.
Cheap Tommy Bahama Cohen V Neck Tee Shirt (Color: Blue Anole, Size L)
I kid you not. Check it out here. The color is “blue anole.” Just what does that mean? For one thing, it doesn’t look like the blue anoles I know.
Your intrepid reporter contacted Tommy Bahama to get to the bottom of this. To my amazement, they responded in about 3 minutes! Here’s what they said:
“Thank you for contacting Tommy Bahama. A Blue Anole is a type of lizard that is known for its distinctive blue color. Our design team determined that this particular shade of blue for the Cohen V-Neck T-Shirt (#TD2753) was similar enough to the shade of the lizard to be a color choice. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance regarding this matter.
We appreciate your patronage & continued interest in Tommy Bahama!
Kind Regards,
Tommy Bahama
Guest Services
Relax in Style”
The good news, though, is that even though TB sells it for this fine quality T for $48, you can find it for as low as $45 by doing a little googling.
Anolis brunneus going at it on Crooked Islands, Bahamas. Photo by Michele Johnson
And we have a winner: but is it who you think? Photo by Andrew Battlees
Anolis brunneus is a close relative of A. carolinensis, but is unusual in that it has lost the ability to turn bright green–the best it can manage is a dull olive. Little is known of this species, but you can read the latest from a recent expedition led by Thom Sanger and Michele Johnson (1,2).
While on this trip, Michele and her student Andrew Bartley observed the following fracas between two male brunnei (incidentally, A. brunneus attains a size greater than most A. carolinensis and comparable to the largest A. porcatus).
Michele tells the story: “Near the end of our first full day of fieldwork on Crooked Island, part of our field team (Trinity University student Chris Robinson, recent graduate Andrew Battles, and myself) observed two males displaying extensively to one another, in full blue head color with their crests raised and their black “armpit” spot showing. (This seems to be a variation on the black eyespot in A. carolinensis that appears when the lizards are threatened.) We watched the lizards posture at each other for some time (perhaps 15 minutes), chasing and retreating, with many dewlap extensions and head-bobbing displays. The lizards eventually locked their jaws in the fight, and remained in this position for about 20 minutes, until one lizard threw the other off the tree branch – but the “hanging” lizard hung on, eventually pulling himself back up to the branch, and ultimately threw the other lizard off the branch entirely. During the fight, I took pictures from the ground, while Andrew climbed a tree (~3m up) to take pictures from the perch height of the lizards. It was quite an exciting way to end our first day of behavioral observation!”
Male Anolis proboscis. Photo by Jonathan Losos
Of all the anoles great and small, near and far, green and brown, one stands out for its combination of elegance, charm, and mystique. I refer, of course, to the Ecuadorian horned anole, Anolis proboscis, denizen of Andean forests, possessor of an enchanted sword, and all-around lizard of mystery. Now, however, the veil has been lifted, as the first reports on the biology of the previously unknown lizard have just been published in Breviora, a journal of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
Rediscovered by birdwatchers. How embarrassing. Photo by Wanda Parrott.
The mystery comes in three acts. The first concerned the continued existence of the horned anole. The species was discovered in 1953 and over the next 13 years, another five were found, all male like the first, all from the vicinity of the Ecuadorian town of Mindo. Then, for four decades…nothing. Many feared the species extinct, perhaps a victim of the deforestation that has ravaged so much of the Western side of the Andes. All this changed in 2005 when a group of birdwatchers spied one crossing a road near Mindo (mind you, this is an arboreal lizard—insert your own joke). Anolis proboscis lives!
The photo above made its way onto the internet and to the attention of Steve Poe, an expert on locating hard-to-find anoles, who led a team of American and Ecuadorian scientists back to Mindo in the summer of 2009. Poe’s approach to finding day-active anoles is seemingly perverse: he stays up all night looking for them. The reason is simple: many anole species sleep on narrow twigs or leaves, presumably because approaching predators will produce vibrations on the flimsy perches, alerting the lizards to impending danger. Although this strategy may be effective in avoiding predators that creep, crawl or slither along branches, it’s not so well-suited to avoid detection by flashlight-toting herpetologists, who are attuned to locating the tiny reptiles—which conveniently blanch to a pale color at night—even when they’re roosting 20-30 feet high in the canopy. Poe’s team quickly located a large number of lizards, establishing that the species not only exists, but seems to have a healthy population.
Unbeknownst to Poe, another team of researchers independently had discovered a new horned anole locality. This team, from the Ecuadorian Museum of Science in Quito, located five specimens of the horned anole at two sites 11-13 km northeast of the original collecting locality, slightly extending the known range of the species. Both groups published detailed descriptions of the anatomy of the species—the Ecuadorian group last year and Poe’s team as the first of the Breviora set published today—describing previously unknown variation in horn size and shape, as well as differences in color and patterning both among males and between the sexes.
And, speaking of differences between the sexes, that leads to the resolution of mystery number two. Ever since the species was first described and the initial half dozen specimens collected, lizard enthusiasts have wondered—what about the females? Do they have horns, too? Of course, in the absence of any information on the natural history of the species, it was hard to have an informed opinion. Is the horn used in self defense, in which case the lady lizards could probably use one as well as the guys? Or is it used by males to fight amongst themselves, or even as an ornament used to woo or titillate? Nobody knew, and so it was anybody’s guess whether the females were nasally adorned or not. But now we know the answer. Before I reveal it, take a moment and take a guess: yes or no? When you’re ready, scroll past the lovely photo of another male and see for yourself.
Male Anolis proboscis. Photo by Luke Mahler
Obama, the anole, victorious. Check it out on Dust Tracks on the Web
A while back, we had a report of the fabled gray-dewlapped green anole at Corkscrew Swamp in the environs of Naples, FL. Janson Jones headed down there to see for himself (making him an honorary Missourian), but got both more and less than he bargained for. Check out his dispatches from yesterday and today.
Anolis cristatellus on Necker Island, British Virgin Islands, which is owned by Richard Branson. Photo by Charlie Smith.
That’s right, that Richard Branson, the Virgin Group magnate. Check it out here.
Back to Abaco
Well, the 2012 Abaco Expedition is over. For almost a year, we’ve been wondering what effect Hurricane Irene had on our lizard populations. Now we know.
A little background: initially, we feared the worst. Hurricanes had destroyed several previous experiments. The culprit was not the high winds, but the high water, which put our tiny, lowlying islands underwater for up to six hours, drowning or sweeping away all lizardkind. But then word trickled in that this time, maybe things weren’t so bad. The storm had come at the best time possible–absolute low tide–and from a direction that minimized the amount of storm surge that could build up in the protected areas where most of our islands occurred. Maybe things weren’t so bad.
So, back we came to Abaco several weeks ago to find out. We have two experiments going on. The primary study focuses on the effect of anole-eating curly-tailed lizards. What effects do the curlies have on the population size and behavior of the brown anole, A. sagrei? And, in turn, how do these changes trickle down to lower levels of the food web? These studies occur on islands up to 300 square meters in area (that’s less than 1/2 the area enclosed by the bases in a baseball infield).
Seaweed in a bush, showing the high water mark of Hurricane Irene
The result of the hurricane: mixed. Several islands lie in a very exposed position, and their populations were decimated, to less than 10 individuals on both. In case there’s any doubt about the culprit for this crash, the dried seaweed strung high in the bushes is clear evidence of the highwater mark of the storm. On most other islands, those not so exposed to the storm’s onslaught, A. sagrei populations are higher, even those with the curly-tailed lizards. It seems that it was a overall a good year for lizards, except for those islands exposed to the hurricane’s wrath.
Our founder effect experiment occurred on seven tiny–and very low-lying–islands. These islands were wiped lizard-free by the last hurricanes to pass through the region, Frances and Jeanne in 2004. We re-inoculated the islands with brown anoles in 2005, placing one male and one female on each island. As I reported previously, the genetic and phenotypic mark of these founder events were still evident four years later.
Given past history and the diminutive size of the islands, we were not optimistic. But here, too, the results were mixed. Three islands were almost exterminated: down to two adults (and, encouragingly, one recent hatchling) on one island, and 4-5 on two others. But as with the bigger islands, the results here, too, were mixed, as one population increased from 25 to 49 and several others held steady with large populations.
These results lead to an interesting situation. All populations were established by a founding event, but now only several of them have experienced a subsequent population bottleneck. How will that effect patterns of divergence among the island populations? And let’s not forget that those who have postulated the importance of founder effects for species divergence and even speciation suggested that it was serial founder events/bottlenecks that were particularly likely to lead to important changes. Who knows? Maybe next year we’ll return to find a couple of newly evolved species.
Photo by Scott Hartley.
Details at Chipojolab.
Have you heard about the extremely expensive (and delicious) coffee from Indonesia made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of civets (hence called “cat poo” coffee because civets are sometimes called civet cats? Did you know that a similar coffee is produced in Central America, made from beans pooped out by Norops anoles? Well, that’s not what this post is about.
Rather, it’s about several recent studies on anoles in coffee plantations. One recent study, discussed at further length by Rich Glor, compares the biodiversity of sun and shade coffee plantations in Puerto Rico. The authors note at the outset that biodiversity tends to be higher in shade coffee areas, and wanted to see whether that was true in Puerto Rico. In a truly herculean effort, they censused the lizards, birds, insects and vegetation in six plantations, three shade, three sunny. This was a lot of work. Just for the lizards, they individually marked (via paint spray gun) nearly 5000 anoles.