Congratulations to Neil Losin for winning the second round of our header photo contest with his image of A. sagrei from South Miami. In an effort to be inclusive, I’ve included the top six photographers from each of the first two rounds in the final vote. Ramon E. Martínez-Grimaldo’s image in the first round slaughtered the competition with 136 votes (the next highest vote getter had 26 votes); will his image of A. isthmicus take home the grand prize?
Author: Rich Glor Page 7 of 13
I’ve credited the fourth king of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy – Albert Schwartz – with describing eight Greater Antillean anole species. The period during which Schwartz’s career overlapped with Williams’s and that of the fifth yet-t0-be-revealed king were the glory years of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy. Over a little more than a decade in the late 1960s through the 1970s, these three figures described over 10 species, including some of the last new species discovered on Hispaniola and Jamaica. The activities of these three key figures were highly synergistic; Schwartz and Williams often contributed to one another’s work and divvied up projects to mutual benefit (even though they never described an anole species together) and Schwartz was a junior coauthor with the fifth king on several species descriptions.
After graduating with a PhD from the University of Michigan, Schwartz spent the majority of his academic career at Miami Dade Community College, an institution known more for its massive enrollment than for its faculty’s contributions to systematics. Early in his career, Schwartz worked primarily in Cuba, resulting in the description of three species, including two locally restricted species related to the Cuban crown-giant anole Anolis equestris (baracoae and smallwoodi) and a widespread trunk-ground species (jubar) that is the xeric forest counterpart to another widespread Cuban trunk-ground anole found primarily in mesic environments (homolechis). Schwartz would later devote his attention to Hispaniola, ultimately describing five species from both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As was the case with Williams, many of the Hispaniola taxa that Schwartz described were unusual montane endemics (rimarum, fowleri, sheplani, and eugenegrahami).
We’re certainly not shy about posting on our favorite lizards being eaten by other organisms (see this post and links therein). Heck, we’ve even posted on anoles being eaten by plants and insects. However, I can’t help but be a bit disturbed by videos posted online that show anoles being used as food for captive chameleons (1, 2, 3, and many others). Although many of the videos start with the anole already in the much large chameleons mouth, at least one of these videos shows a large veiled chameleon using its tongue to catch the anole (1, 2). A giant sticky tongue is not likely something anoles have evolved any defenses against.
iNaturalist.org is an on-line community for naturalists where you can “record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world.” We’ve teamed with iNaturalist to provide a new anole-specific widget that allows our readers to see previously reported anole records and add records of their own to iNaturalist’s growing on-line database. Check out our new Citizen Science page to give the iNaturalist widget a spin!
This is the second round of voting for the best Anole Annals header photo. As reported previously, the winner will receive a signed copy of Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree. On the strength of dozens of votes from visitors arriving at our page from Mexico via Facebook , Ramon E. Martínez-Grimaldo’s photograph of A. isthmicus was the landslide winner of the first round. Congratulations Ramon! Next week we’ll have a final vote involving the top vote-getters to determine the winner.
Our Anole Annals header photo contest has elicited some rather spectacular entries. Narrowing the field to a manageable number of entries for voting was no easy feat and was achieved largely be excluding entries that were improperly sized. There were too many good entries to reasonably fit all of them into a single poll, so we’re going to vote for the grand prize winner of the signed book in two rounds. Here’s the first round:
More details on the contest after the jump.
Following Barbour’s work, nearly a quarter century would pass before another Harvard man picked up the mantle of describing new anoles. Among his many other contributions, Ernest Williams named 12 species of anoles from Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola between 1959 and 1975. By the time Williams came along, most of the abundant and widely-distributed anoles had already been described. Many of the species Williams described are montane endemics (A. reconditus, A. christophei, A. etheridgei, A. dolicocephalus, A. occultus, A. singularis, A. insolitus) that might have been more difficult to access during previous generations of herpetological exploration in the West Indies. The last Greater Antillean species he described – Anolis marcanoi – was among the first “cryptic” anole species to be recognized with the aid of molecular markers. Even after his work describing new Greater Antillean anoles came to an end, Williams continued to describe new species of anoles from the mainland through the 1980s. In his last publication in 1999 (published after his death in 1998), Williams called an end to the era of discovery in anoles. For more on Williams, you can read the memorial published in the Harvard Gazette in 2009 by A. W. Crompton, Karel Liem and Jonathan Losos.
A 'slug' next to a healthy, freshly laid egg. The scale bars in millimeters.
Anyone who’s raised anoles has likely run across the occasional slug. I’m not talking about shell-less gastropod mollusks, but rather about the flaccid yellow eggs that anoles lay from time to time. Slugs are uncalcified and generally considered infertile. Because slugs never develop viable embryos and tend to quickly rot when incubated most lizard keepers simply discard them. Is there anything to be learned from slugs? In our colony, we tend to recover the most slugs early and late in the breeding season, but we’re not sure why this is the case. Is it possible that the male and female are a bit out of sync, or that the female is priming her reproductive tract for the real deal? We’re also recovering more slugs in our hybrid crosses than in pure crosses, but we’ll have more on that later. Are any reproductive physiologists out there more familiar with the mechanisms responsible for production of slugs?
If you’re here, you’ve caught on to the fact that we’ve moved to our new home at anoleannals.org. We’re having a header photo contest to celebrate this move, but before introducing the contest I need to cover some important information about the move.
First, I want to say thanks to Melissa Woolley for making the move possible. Melissa moved the entirety of past Annals – including posts, comments, categories, and tags – to a new server, so you can just keep on using the new blog the same way you did the old one. Note that comments and posts on the new anoleannals.org site will not appear at the old anoleannals.wordpress.com, and vice versa. To avoid confusion, the old blog will soon disappear entirely from view. Melissa painstakingly created new accounts for all of our old users on the new system, but you might need to reset your password, which you can do here. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this might cause and welcome any feedback about how we could further smooth the transition. Temporary glitches aside, this move permits us to make some much needed improvements and expansions to the blog (we’ll introduce one such improvement very shortly!). Those of you who routinely get to us by Googling “Anole Annals,” should use this opportunity to bookmark our new page!
OK, on to the photo contest! We’re looking for new header images and need your help. We’ll likely do a reader poll to pick a few winners among the entries received, but the precise format of the contest will depend upon the number of entries we get. Winning photos will earn a place of honor among our set of rotating header images. In order to be considered, an image must be precisely 1000 pixels wide by 288 pixels high. We’ll credit you as photographer wherever possible, but ask that images not include any text or watermarks. You can submit your images using our blog’s new ability to easily add images to a comment; just click the “Choose File” link beneath the comment box and navigate to your JPEG photo. I can’t wait to see all of your amazing anole images!
I previously introduced my mission to recognize the five anole systematists responsible for describing the majority of the anole species found in the Greater Antilles. The first king of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy was the prolific E. D. Cope. Cope was the last in a line of authors who described anole species that he’d never actually spent time with in the field (see also Duméril and Bibron). The next king on my list, by contrast, was an avid field biologist and conducted field work in the West Indies throughout his career.