I like the mexican anoles
Happy Darwin’s day everybody!
This is the third serial year in which I have remembered Darwin Day in Anole Annals. In the first time, Jonathan Losos made a wise comment in citing the words of Darwin about an anole (read his comment here). That’s why, this year, I have added two pages from ‘The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex’ in which Darwin wrote about the sexual selection of Anolis cristatellus and Sitana.
I read a recent news about “The secret to running repairs” and I remembered an older AA post about a hypothetical genetic biologist who researched the ability of certain reptiles to regrow missing limbs, partially to find a way to regrow his own missing arm.
Today, his noble research could be real thanks to a Mexican god. Yeah, the Axolotl, who according to the Aztec myth is a god transformed on a neotenic salamander with the hope that their ability to regenerate body parts will one day help people with amputations.
The Axolotl has become the amphibian prefered by many scientists around the world thanks to its capacity to regenerate both their hurt limbs as well as its jaw, skin, organs and even parts of the brain and the spinal cord. And to top things off, it doesn’t get cancer.
Scientists believe that it will only take a decade or two before the dream of Curt Connors could became a reality: the human limbs could regenerate like the axolotl.
I’m very excited for this news that I believe I forgot the anoles for a little moment.
Principal image modified from Alföldi et al.
According to the Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, today is the end day of the Year of Lizard (2012) and the arrival tomorrow of 2013 marks the beginning of the Year of the Snake.
On the lizard’s year, the anoles were present in the poster (with Anolis grahami) and the november month on the Monthly Calendar (with Anolis phyllorhinus). Maybe for next calendar will be present Anolis pseudoophiosaurus.
Watch the cuban documentary: ANOLIS: VIGILANTES DE DÍA
In the year 2010, a group of students from the International School of Film and Television from San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, made a film: “Anolis: Vigilantes of the Day,” an excellent documentary of nine minutes about Cuban anoles. The documentary is narrated in Spanish and has the best aspects of the natural history of these lizards, including some ecomorphs and the use of the dewlap in displays.
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Charles Darwin
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