Today’s JMIH poster session was an anole lover’s paradise! Five posters featured molecular phylogenetic work on anoles, including studies of A. humilis (John Phillips from Central Michigan University), A. limifrons (Jenny Gubler from CMU), the pentaprion group (Julian Davis from the University of New Mexico), the distichus group (Anthony Geneva from the University of Rochester), and the ricordii group (Shea Lambert from the U of R).
Author: Rich Glor Page 11 of 13
The recent literature has been full of doom and gloom regarding the prospects for lizard survival in the face of global climate change (e.g., Sinervo et al. 2010). A talk by Alex Gunderson from Manuel Leal’s lab at Duke University provided some important new insights on how our favorite lizards are likely to weather this storm. Gunderson investigated thermal ecology of Anolis cristatellus at nine localities, including four mesic and five xeric locales. His data included thousands of field collected temperature records from live animals and copper models as well as data on preferred body temperature and sprint speed performance across a range of temperatures. Temperature data from live animals and co-distributed copper models showed that the xeric, but not the mesic, populations are behavioral thermoregulators that tend to be found in cooler spots than the randomly placed copper models. Even with the benefit of behavioral thermoregulation, the xeric forest lizards were consistently active at temperatures that exceeded their preferred body temperature. When Gunderson integrated these findings with data on sprint speed performance and climate change, he found that the xeric forest animals are likely to suffer significant reductions in performance associated with climate change. Gunderson ended with a teaser by showing that he has accumulated comparable data on performance across a range of temperatures for all the other Puerto Rican anoles. Next year’s talk should be a blockbuster!
Range map for Anolis aliniger (triangles) and Anolis bahorucoensis (cirlces).
Do you ever stop and think about how long it must have taken Schwartz and Henderson to make all those amazing dot maps in their 1991 opus on West Indian amphibians and reptiles? They plotted known localities for every species of West Indian amphibian and reptile in the days before GPS and GIS! These days, making dot maps of species distributions is considerably less onerous, but often requires the use of cumbersome, expensive, and PC-only programs like ArcGIS. For the past couple of weeks, some folks in my lab – Daniel Scantlebury, Anthony Geneva, and Shea Lambert – have been attempting to make nice distribution maps for Caribbean anoles and other reptiles using the R statistical computing framework (R has a pretty steep learning curve for beginners, but it’s flexible, scriptable, free, and cross-platform). The results so far are pretty exciting. If you have a list of georeferenced localities, you can overlay these points on a very detailed political map in a matter of seconds. We’re just beginning to learn how to tap R’s map making potential and would love to hear from others doing the same! Technical details after the jump…
Down the hatch. Anolis cybotes eats A. marron. Photo by Luke Mahler.
A few years back I was asked to give a talk to some undergraduate marine biology students studying at the Discovery Bay Marine Lab in Jamaica. I brought a live Jamaican giant anole (A. garmani) to this presentation, and told the students that this species eats just about any other animals it can fit in its mouth – including other anoles. One of the students seemed shocked by this revelation and suggested that “they only eat other anoles in emergencies, right?” This necessitated a little lecture on nature red in tooth and claw that seemed to leave some of the students on the verge of tears. (Presumably readers of this blog already know that whatever concerns organisms might have about inclusive fitness do not extend to the intra-generic level.)
Although anole on anole predation is a well-known phenomenon, most reports involve adults feeding on much smaller juveniles. In the latest issue of Herpetological Review, Luke Mahler and I report an exception to this generality involving predation by an adult male Anolis cybotes on an adult female Anolis marron. With a prey SVL ~60% as large as the predator’s (70mm for the predator v. 45mm for the prey) this observation ranks as the highest predator:prey ratio ever reported for anoles. Given that the A. cybotes failed to fully ingest its prey during the 8+ hours we held it captive, we speculate that this event was at, or perhaps even above, this individual’s prey size limit.
This shot was taken by anole biologist Todd Jackman on Main St. USA during a recent trip to Disney World. Can you spot the anole?
From http://xkcd.com/
Owl monkeys in the genus Aotus may be the closest extant relatives of the Greater Antillean primate fauna. Fig. 1 is from Cooke et al.'s recent PNAS paper and summarizes known primate fossils from the Greater Antilles.
Imagine wandering around the Greater Antilles on an anole hunt with monkeys bouncing among the trees above. As it turns out, your imagination wouldn’t need to take you back more than a few hundred years to make this vision a reality. The Jamaican monkey (Xenothrix macgregori) – which was described in 1952 by Ernest Williams (a.k.a. the godfather of Anolis biology) and Karl Koopman (a.k.a. the namesake of the Haitian endemic Anolis koopmani) – may have even survived to see the first European explorers.
A recent PNAS article describes the fifth species of extinct monkey endemic to the Greater Antilles (two are from Cuba, two from Hispaniola, and one from Jamaica; see map above for more details). A precise age for this fossil is unknown, but the available evidence is consistent with the Holocene. In their description of Toussaint’s island monkey (Insulacebus toussaintiana), Cooke et al. contribute new data to the long-standing debate about the origins and evolutionary implications of the West Indian primate fauna. Most students of Greater Antillean monkeys agree that they represented a relictual clade of primates that had long since disappeared from northern South America. Although their precise phylogenetic affinities are still being debated, the West Indian species seem to be most closely related to either the owl monkeys (Aotus) or the titi monkeys (Callicebus). Cooke et al. further suggest that the large size of the Greater Antillean primates relative to mainland relatives may have resulted from the island effect.
This photograph was taken by a colleague visiting some of Belize’s offshore islands. I’m pretty sure I recognize this species from my time in mainland Belize, but I thought I’d open it up to the community for additional opinions. What species do you think this is?
Six years after publishing his impressive monograph on geographic variation in Anolis distichus, Schwartz published a similarly impressive monograph on geographic variation in Hispaniolan crown-giant anoles (Schwartz 1974). At the time this monograph was written, most authorities recognized a single polymorphic species of Hispaniola crown-giant anole with three subspecies: A. r. ricordii, A. r. baleatus, A. r. leberi, and A. r. barahonae (see my previous post on the spelling of ricordii if you’ve seen this name spelled with a single final “i” previously). However, as was the case with distichus, controversy was brewing before Schwartz’s monograph about whether these forms were best recognized at the specific or subspecific level and whether additional distinct forms had yet to be recognized within existing taxa.
I took this photograph last summer in the Sierra de Bahorucos of the Dominican Republic, not far from Polo. The first to answer the following three questions about this photo wins the respect of anole lovers around the world: (1) how many anoles are in this photo?, (2) what ecomorphs to they represent?, and (3) what species are they? First correct answers in the comments wins.
