Calling all Boston-area anole enthusiasts! This Saturday I will be giving a lecture at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) through their Adult Classes program. I will be giving the first talk in a three-part “Topics in Evolution” series, and my focus will be on explaining Convergent Evolution, Adaptation, and Sexual Selection. We know that anoles are a fantastic model system for each of these topics, so you can expect that they will be prominently featured. I will discuss community convergence in Anolis lizards, provide laboratory exercises using ethanol-preserved specimens, and discuss anoles in the public galleries of the Museum. If you’re broadly interested in anoles and in evolution, this might be a fun event for you!
Author: Martha Muñoz Page 7 of 8
Martha is a postdoctoral researcher in Sheila Patek's laboratory at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. at Harvard University, where she studyied the evolutionary ecology and thermal physiology of anoles, focusing on the cybotoid anoles from the Dominican Republic. Martha serves as Conference Editor for the Anole Annals.
Website: www.marthamunoz.weebly.com
A view of the volcano as seen from the abandoned town of Richmond Hill. Photo: Jim Hewlett
As “anolologists” we think of the Lesser Antilles as one of the major treasure troves of colorful and extravagant lizards. They have been the subject of many AA posts (here, here, here, and here, among others). While gazing at anoles dewlapping in swaying palm trees, it’s easy to forget that the Lesser Antilles are a volcanic arc. However, on the tiny island of Montserrat where Anolis lividus is found, the volcano is alive and active. After a long dormancy the volcano awoke in 1995 and, within only a few weeks of activity, the capital city of Plymouth and surrounding areas were carpeted in several meters of pyroclastic material. Today Plymouth is a modern-day Pompeii. Plymouth is also the type locality for Anolis lividus, a charismatic medium-sized lizard from the bimaculatus clade of Lesser Antillean anoles. It was extraordinarily abundant in Plymouth and surrounding areas, according to Skip Lazell’s 1972 monograph in the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Since 2009 I’ve been surveying this lizard across the island, and have tried to find it as close to the volcano as I can get.
Greetings, Anole Annals readers, from lovely Charleston. It may not be balmy here, but it’s warmer than my usual habitat of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is currently experiencing an “Arctic front,” which is fancy speak for blistering cold wind. For those of you who couldn’t be here, this morning held some great Anolis talks at SICB, and I was able to attend three. The first was by Maureen Stimola, a senior undergraduate student at Columbia University who did her senior thesis with me in the Dominican Republic this past summer. Maureen’s research project addressed how thermal tolerance (CTmin and CTmax) changes with elevation in the cybotoids (A. cybotes and related trunk-grounds) from the Dominican Republic.
Early morning sighting of a female Anolis leachii on a leaf covered in raindrops.
Sometimes, they say, it’s about the journey, not the destination. This makes me think of exciting layovers I’ve had in Anolis country. At any place where the layover is long enough to permit stepping outside of the airport, I like to pop out and see what kind of anoles I can find lurking around the terminals. On a few occasions, travel requires an overnight stay in an exciting place. One of the benefits of working in remote Lesser Antillean islands is that infrequent (and unpredictable) airline schedules typically mean spending a night or two in tiny islands to and from the actual destination. For years I’ve been working in Montserrat, a small island with an active volcano, where I try to follow the flighty bugger Anolis lividus as close to the volcano as I can get. On our way home from Montserrat, we usually spend a night in Antigua, where the charming giant, Anolis leachii can be found.
View of a raincloud and rainbow as we descended into Antigua in January 2009.
Like most anoles from the Lesser Antilles, this species is abundant. However, few species from the Lesser Antilles are as large as A. leachii. It is a member of the bimaculatus clade of large anoles from the Northern Lesser Antilles. According to Scwhartz and Henderson (1991), it can reach a snout-vent length of 123 mm. For anyone who works with crown-giants, this may not seem so large, but for an aficionado of the Lesser Antillean anoles, Anolis leachii is a relative behemoth! Its body ranges from yellow to blue and green, and it’s covered in a purplish vermiculation. The large eyering ranges from a sulfurous yellow to a deep orange. Hands down, this is one of the world’s most beautiful anoles. Imagine my excitement when I got to spend a night chasing these lizards through the wilds of Antigua Village, a cushy beach resort teeming with Anolis leachii and the smaller congener, A. wattsii. Here I offer some photos of this dazzling species, and a bit of its taxonomic history.
Male Anolis marmoratus marmoratus from the town Capesterre in Guadeloupe.
Ali versus Frazier. Athens versus Sparta. Harry Potter versus Voldemort. History has had it share of epic battles, many of which we have documented on the Anole Annals, such as here and here. In my humble opinion, however, none of those minor scuffles can measure up to a thrilling encounter I photographed between two males of Anolis marmoratus on the island of Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe.
Check out this piece in the New Scientist, which picked up on our images of Anolis embryos and Thom’s awesome research!
Embryo of Anolis longitibialis, a trunk-ground anole from the Dominican Republic.
The readers of this blog do not need to be convinced that anoles are an amazing model system in evolutionary biology. New and exciting research often finds its way to the Anole Annals. Here we’ve learned about emerging trends in Anolis genomics, speciation, and comparative phylogenetics, to list just a few. In recent years, Anolis has also become a model system for developmental biology. For example, a recent study by Dr. Thom Sanger demonstrated that the diversity of limb dimensions among ecomorphs have evolved from similar developmental mechanisms.
This summer I worked a bit with Thom to learn how to stage Anolis embryos using his handy staging series as a guide. The goal of the project was to determine the stage at which female anoles laid eggs under two treatment conditions – a hot treatment (32°C) and a cold treatment (20°C). I had females from three populations of A. cybotes (55, 700, and 1400 meters in elevation), one population of A. shrevei (2450 m), and one population of A. longitibialis (100m). Unfortunately, I was unable to collect very many eggs despite letting the experiment run for six weeks. I did, however, manage to get several beautiful embryos, which I have imaged and staged. Here I’ll provide some pictures and give a few shorthand methods for staging Anolis embryos.
Eric Pianka in the field with Varanus gouldii. Photo: Gisela Kaufmann
Eric Pianka is no stranger to bizarre conversations. As a public figure in evolutionary biology, he has engaged in numerous perplexing discussions with vociferous dissenters from the Creationist and Intelligent Design camps. On September 26, 2011 Eric Pianka received what was possibly the strangest phone call yet from David Hillis, a friend and fellow Professor at the University of Texas, Austin. Hillis informed him that rumor had it that Eric had died. Pianka learned that his obituary had been emailed to the herpetological community through the Center for North American Herpetology (CNAH), in memory of his recent passing. This is certainly not the first instance of bilocation for Eric, whose self-written obituary has been around for over two decades and available on his laboratory webpage for nearly as long. Most readers know that it is a spoof. The heading says so and the obituary ends with “Eric Pianka can be reached at eric.pianka@heaven/hell.com,” but every now and then he gets an uncomfortable email. However, this was the first time that a year of death was added to the obituary and emailed en masse to the thousands of subscribers.
Anoles cozy up in captivity. Photo by Huai-Ti Lin
This summer I have been breeding several populations of cybotoids to assess egg stage at laying in this environmentally-varied clade of anoles. The cybotoids are trunk-ground anoles from Hispaniola, which includes Anolis cybotes and related species. Captive animals often exhibit behaviors they normally may not perform in the wild, and my colony is no exception. I offer two examples and am wondering if the readers of this blog have come across similar phenomena. First, a female Anolis cybotes ate one of her eggs. When I came to search for eggs it was already in her mouth and, when I returned later, she had swallowed it. Second, the two anoles pictured here found a cozy sleeping spot together on their bamboo pole perch. Is it odd for females to eat their own eggs, or do anoles in captivity commonly do so? I should add that these lizards are properly fed, and so hunger is not likely to be the cause of the behavior. Do mating pairs warm up to each other when kept together in captivity, or do they generally keep a healthy distance even in a cage?
In a recent post Miguel Landestoy shared a phenomenal photo of an unfortunate Anolis whitemani that met an untimely end in the dunes of Salinas, in the Dominican Republic. This got me thinking about odd anole deaths that I have seen in the field. Sometimes the cause of death is quite clear. Perhaps a limb has been torn off, or the body otherwise bears the marks of predation. On other occasions, however, how the anole met its fate appears more elusive.
I am irreparably fond of anoles, but I must admit that they are not the cuddliest of beasts. In fact, they can be downright unfriendly, especially with each other. The mere sight of another male sends anoles into spasms and, when not mating, males and females seem to barely tolerate each other, at best. It would seem that cuddling is best left to mammals and birds, but recent observations would indicate that even the ornery anole has a soft side.
Anolis shrevei mating pair cuddling in Valle Nuevo, Dominican Republic.
A post by Kat Wollenberg on this blog documented two Anolis etheridgei sleeping with their tails intertwined. A follow-up post by Melissa Woolley shows that Anolis gemmosus mating pairs sleep near each other, even if not touching.
But does an anole have to be asleep to show its softer side? In June 2011 I observed an Anolis shrevei mating pair in Valle Nuevo cuddle as they basked one afternoon. It is chilly at 2500 meters, even in the Dominican Republic. It had been a cold morning, and neither the sun nor the lizards had shown themselves until almost noon. But when the sun did peek out from behind the clouds, there was a mass exodus of anoles, which came out from under their rocks to take advantage of the day’s first rays. This little pair came out from under the same rock and sat together for close to an hour. They were touching each other, despite the fact that there seemed to be enough rock to go around. Whether this was coincidence or another mechanism of behavioral thermoregulation, the anoles of the chilly Cordillera Central know how to keep warm.