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The Howey lab showed up to work at SICB 2020! In keeping with the theme of how urbanization and artificial light at night (ALAN) impacts wildlife populations, Elizabeth Kenny, an undergraduate researcher at the University of Scranton performed a study to describe the influence of artificial light on the immune response in green anoles (Anolis carolinensis).

The researchers used a test for immune response called a phytohemagglutinin test (PHA-L), where they injected the hindlimbs of green anoles with PHA-L and measured how much the foot swelled after both a 24 and a 48h hour period. But rest assured! PHA-L tests are temporary, only induce localized swelling, and have no larger impacts on the health of the organism; it’s sort of like if you’ve ever had a tuberculosis test done at your local physician. Interestingly, Elizabeth found no difference in swelling between green anoles exposed to ALAN and to green anoles that had not been exposed to ALAN. However, Elizabeth suggested that green anoles could respond sufficiently to ALAN by changing how they use the energy within their bodies and where they allocated those limited energetic stores, which provides a lot of support for the work of Michelle D’Allesandro and Meg McGrath. Altogether, the three undergraduate researchers of the Howey lab created a convincing and interesting story about how urban environments influence the energetics and physiology of city-dwelling lizards. Great stuff!

SICB 2020: City Anoles Have Bigger Toes!

By Anthony Gilbert

On January 8, 2020

In All Posts, New Research

Urbanization was a big theme at SICB 2020 this year, and studies of how city life influences wildlife populations are really important to help us understand the effects of human activity on natural environments and animals. One of the most rapid ways in that city-dwelling animals can adapt to these new environments is by changing the shape and size of various morphological traits.

Anoles in their natural habitat do tend to be tree-dwelling, or arboreal lizards, and they spend a lot of time climbing to find food resources, regulate their body temperature, and do other ecological activities. A lizard that relies so much on climbing performance frequently uses its claws and toe pads in its climbing ventures, so one of the first changes that city anoles might exhibit is changes in toe pad or claw shape to better climb on slick city surfaces (say that 3 times fast!). To get at this question, Bailey Howell from the Mississippi University for Women, along with her co-authors Travis Hagey and Kristin Winchell, compared urban crested anoles (Anolis cristatellus) to forested crested anoles and found that toe pads in urban anoles are longer and wider than toe pads from lizards in natural environments.

Bailey goes on to discuss that these toe pads that have an increased area might be better for urban anoles to climb on slicker and smoother substrates found in city environments. Bailey is going to continue adding to her dataset by incorporating more anoles and testing additional hypotheses such as measuring performance differences between urban and forested anoles. Stay tuned for more urban anole work!

SICB 2020: Gene Expression Can Lead to Size Dimorphism in Anole Lizards

By Anthony Gilbert

On January 8, 2020

In All Posts, New Research

The Panamanian slender anole (Anolis apletophallus).

In keeping with the previous year, Albert Chung (now a Ph.D. student at UCLA with Shane Campbell-Staton), presented in the prestigious Division of Ecology and Evolution Raymond B. Huey best student paper session of SICB2020. Albert’s work encompasses a very old, enduring, and important question in biology: how males and females of the same species exhibit differences in so many traits, despite the fact that males and females share a common genome.

A male brown anole from the island of Great Exuma, in The Bahamas.

This dynamic is called sexual conflict: when what is best for one sex might not be the best for the other sex, and has challenged biologists for decades to study a multitude of incredible organisms to answer this question, including anoles! Albert and his collaborators addressed this question by studying two species of anole, the brown anole (Anolis sagrei) and the Panamanian slender anole (Anolis apletophallus). Brown anoles are one species where males are super large compared to females, whereas in the slender anole, males and females are relatively the same size.

Albert et al. described differences in the genes expressed in both males and females to understand what factors promote the development of male-biased size dimorphism. They found that differences in gene expression between males and females was highest in gonad tissue compared to liver and brain tissue, and that when female lizards are supplemented with additional testosterone (traditionally viewed as a hormone more highly concentrated in males of a given species), their gene expression profiles look like those of male lizards. They also found that liver tissue exhibits the greatest differences in sex-biased gene expression, because the liver is one organ responsible for supplying the body with the energy and molecules needed for growth. They suggest that differences in gene expression between males and females might be one factor promoting the evolution of size differences between the sexes, and that physiological controls on these genes could play prominent roles in having males and females exhibit huge differences in traits despite sharing a similar genetic makeup.

SICB 2020: Invasive and Native Anoles Have Different Dietary Niches

By Bailey Howell

On January 6, 2020

In All Posts

Chelsea Connor presenting her research at SICB 2020

Invasive species can often compete for resources with native species, which can have a negative impact on the community. This is an especially common occurrence when it comes to the diet of these competing species. It is important to investigate the diet of both the invader and the native species in order to determine whether this competition is present and if it will cause negative effects in the future.

Chelsea Connor grew up on the island of Dominica. She is currently an undergraduate student at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas in the lab of Dr. Charles M. Watson. Her research addresses the dietary niche overlap of native and invasive species on her home island of Dominica. For this research, Chelsea and another undergraduate student, Destiny Zinn captured and collected feces from Anolis oculatus (a native species) and Anolis cristatellus (an invasive species) on Dominica. They successfully extracted and amplified a region of the cytochrome oxidase I gene from 44 samples. Then they ligated the PCR products and transformed them into E. coli to grow on a plate. After this, they sequenced the resulting clones and placed them into Molecular Taxonomic Operational Units, which were matched using the databases BOLD and GenBank with the help of Daniella Biffi and Dr. Dean Williams at Texas Christian University. They calculated the similarity of diets using the Sørenson coefficient.

Chelsea and her collaborators found a shockingly low degree of dietary overlap, discovering that these two species of anoles on Dominica consume different arthropod prey. They identified 40 prey species in this experiment, and only 4 species were contained in the diet of both the native and invasive anoles. Chelsea emphasizes that there may be dietary niche partitioning, which could explain how the two species are able to coexist across the island and avoid competition.

2019 in Review

By Kristin Winchell

On December 31, 2019

In All Posts

Anolis chloris on the cover of Evolution, photo by J. Salazar

As 2019 wraps up, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on some of the major happenings of the year. It was an active year for Anole Annals and for the anole community. In 2019 we saw ~100 papers on anoles published (note: this is probably an underestimate, since this was based on my google scholar search for “Anolis” and “anole”; check out my list here). As you can see from the word cloud at top of the titles of these papers, anolologists are hard at work studying the ecology and evolution of our favorite lizards. Some major themes from the past year:

Thermal Biology

Thermal biology has long been a topic of interest to anolologists, and 2019 was no exception. Several papers dug into the thermal physiology of anoles this year, pushing the field into new directions. Muñoz and Bodensteiner examined how behavior and environment interact to shape thermal physiology of Dominican anoles. Also working with the Muñoz lab, Salazar et al. compared thermal physiology of mainland versus island anoles to find that island lizards maintain higher body temperatures; their paper was featured on the cover of the journal Evolution. Several groups of researchers set out to understand how elevated temperatures of cities affect anoles. Hall and Warner tested the thermal sensitivity of lizards during development with experiments on Anolis sagrei and Anolis cristatellus, and Battles and Kolbe looked at these same two species in urban Miami, finding that thermal ecology might explain patterns of habitat use in the city.

Performance & Novel Insight into Traits

Likewise, performance has long been a focal theme in anole biology, but 2019 saw researchers investigate traits and their interaction with environments in new ways. Husak and Lailvaux answered the burning question of whether exercise really has any benefits —at least in anoles — and found that lazy lizards are more likely to survive in the wild. Lailvaux and team also looked at inter- and intra-individual variation in bite force, sprint speed, and endurance, finding sex-specific trade-offs between bite-force and sprint speed. Dufour, Donihue, and Losos followed up on their previous hurricane work with a new study showing an increase in clinging performance of anoles on Dominica following Hurricane Maria. Battles, Irschick, and Kolbe took a close look at locomotor performance and limb kinematics of lizards running on tracks that varied in inclination and smoothness, finding that lizards run slower on vertical and smooth tracks and that urban and forest lizards approach moving on these surfaces similarly. Smith et al. analyzed the expression of genes underlying muscle movement to find that gene expression differs between jaw and leg muscles, giving insight into the molecular basis of performance differences. And Ríos-Orjuela et al. made progress on understanding muscle and skeletal structure of limbs and their relation to performance for two species of continental anoles.

2019 was also a year in which researchers took the time to understand some less–well-studied traits. Baeckens et al. took a really close look at scales and described ontogenetic patterns in scales of Anolis cristatellus using a novel approach: gel-based stereo-profilometry. Wegener et al. found that head size of both male and female A. sagrei increase at higher population densities, as do injury rates. Yuan and colleagues sunk their claws in deep to understand the co-evolution of claws and toe pads across 57 species of anoles. Lastly, Prado-Irwin, Revell, and Winchell looked at a poorly understood trait – the tail crest – in A. cristatellus and found that lizards had larger tail crests in hotter and drier regions across the island of Puerto Rico, including in urban habitats.

Prado-Irwin et al. measured tail-crests in urban and forest A. cristatellus

Urbanization

Finally, continuing with the a trend that has been building over the past few years, several researchers published studies on the ecological and evolutionary effects of urbanization on anoles. Some of these I mentioned above, but here’s some additional studies on urban anoles. Avilés-Rodriguez and Kolbe found that A. cristatellus alter their escape responses in cities in part because of habituation but also because of locomotor constraints of using anthropogenic structures. Winchell, Briggs, and Revell analyzed patterns of injuries and asymmetry in urban versus forest populations of A. cristatellus in Puerto Rico. Several researchers took advantage of the abundant and urbanophilic anoles of Florida. Chejanovski and Kolbe evaluated the combined influences of predator abundance, conspecific density, and abiotic environment on body size of urban A. sagrei. Stroud et al. analyzed behavior of A. sagrei in the Miami metropolitan area, finding a two-fold increase in dewlap displays in the more open urban habitats. Thawley and colleagues looked at the interaction between morphology, thermal preference, and parasitism in Miami anoles, with differences in parasitic infection in A. sagrei but not A. cristatellus between urban and rural populations. Lastly, Tiatragul and the Warner lab described variation in nest site locations in urban habitats.

Anolis aquaticus has a bright orange dewlap (photo by Peter Mudde)

Other Significant Events of 2019

The past year has seen several other wonderful papers not highlighted here, if I missed one of your favorites, let me know in the comments. There were also many significant events in the Anole community in 2019 not captured by the publication record. Here’s a couple of my personal favorite stories from 2019. We’ve all wondered and hypothesized if the color shirt we wear while catching anoles influences our capture rate. Well Fondren, Swierk, and Putman finally answered the question for us. Turns out researchers were able to capture more A. aquaticus when they were wearing orange clothing, the same color as the dewlap! Another significant finding in A. aquaticus was the news that the lizard can breathe underwater, apparently using an air bubble on the snout. Although this news broke to the anole world in 2018 (check out the Anole Annals post to see some amazing video!), it was a major story in 2019 across regular news outlets and was published as a Natural History Note by Lindsey Swierk in the March publication of Herpetological Review.

Here on Anole Annals, we had some major happenings too! In January we published the 7th edition of the Anolis Newsletter, thanks to contributions from all of you and the hard work of the newsletter editors James Stroud, Anthony Geneva, and Jonathan Losos. We also unveiled the revamped Anole Annals website, which we are working hard on making a repository of information on anoles – from videos to species information and more. Stay tuned in the coming year as we unveil more updates and implement a new editorial board to bring Anole Annals into the new decade!

Lizards in the Classroom: Learning about Evolution in Action

By Inbar Maayan

On December 27, 2019

In All Posts, Education and Anoles

We are all familiar with the great insights that lizards offer researchers working on evolution– and they’re also great teaching tools! Timna Brown and Jessie Dorman, two fantastic science teachers at New Albany High School in Ohio, developed a lizard-based activity to teach their students about the different mechanisms driving evolution. Brown has posted about this activity on Instagram, and I was lucky enough to get the details from her:

“Getting students excited to learn about complex scientific concepts is not always easy, but this evolution activity is robust, challenging, and brings the concepts of evolution to a level which students can understand and apply. We call it ‘Don’t be a Lazy Lizard!’

Students use straws, scoops and spoons to “feed” at different types of resource stations.

With the goal of helping students understand the complexities and misconceptions surrounding evolution, this simulation teaches students about a multitude of concepts. Focusing on the mechanisms of evolution, these topics include: natural selection, drift, inheritance, mutation effects on a population, predator-prey relationships, environmental pressures, ecological niches, speciation, meiosis, hybridization, reproductive and geographic isolation, genotype, phenotype, dominant, recessive, biomagnification, importance of energy to reproduction, and energy’s role in evolution. Each of these real-world factors are introduced to the students in a tangible way: for instance, a trait might be adaptive in one environment, but costly in another.

In this simulation, students act as lizards with different traits such as body coloration (brown and green) and mouth type (straw, spoon, scoopy) which play an integral part in their ecology, behavior, and interactions. Through dozens of generations, the students compete with one another for access to nectar (water) at a variety of feeding sources (trees, reservoirs, lakes, and troughs). As they try to survive and thrive in their environment, they ‘reproduce’ with one another and exchange genetic information, demonstrating the roles of genotypes, phenotypes, dominant traits, and recessive traits. As lizards in the simulation, they deal with changing food supplies, introduction of predators and food sources, and interspecific competition. With each passing generation, the phenotypic and genotypic frequencies change, and students are able to see populations change over time: EVOLUTION! Things can get pretty heated when these lizards compete, so don’t be a lazy lizard!

Once they were done with the simulation, students graphed their data to understand how populations change over time.

Following the activity, students work on applying the knowledge they gained by answering questions from real-life scenarios of evolution in nature. Taking the data from the simulation, students graph the changes of different phenotypes over time, and connect these changes to various selective pressures. They also work on Hardy-Weinberg problems to investigate how scientists track changes in genotype frequencies related to various traits. Students also develop storyboards to show how their understanding of evolution changed over time as they participated in a population subject to various selective pressures. This activity takes a week or so, but it’s very worthwhile and has been shown to help students understand the critical concepts of evolution.”

Timna Brown and Jessie Dorman, evolution educators extraordinaire.

Activity Adapted from Lazy Lizards, by Jessica Dorman. For the activity guide, contact Jessie Dorman (dorman.1@napls.us) or Timna Brown (brown.76@napls.us).

Help Identify Anoles of Cuba

By Vladimir Dinets

On December 22, 2019

In All Posts

1. Hills above Moa

I just spent a week in Cuba, mostly in the far east, and found a few interesting anoles. Help with identification will be appreciated. Here’s the first batch (all from Moa-Baracoa area in the east).

2. Hills above Moa

3. Hills above Moa

4. Hills above Moa

5. Alturas de Baracoa

6. Alturas de Baracoa

7. Baracoa area

8. Coast west of Baracoa

9. Hills above Moa

9. Hills above Moa

10. Hills above Mo

11. Hills above Moa

Are you going to SICB in 2020? Blog for us!

By Anthony Gilbert

On December 20, 2019

In All Posts

The end of 2019 is nigh, and soon people will be traveling home to spend time with loved ones, eating a superfluous amount of cookies and sweets, and of course, working on that poster or talk for the 2020 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in Austin, Texas. SICB is one of the largest national conferences for biologists, where an incredible diversity of research is presented each year. And of course, SICB meetings are home to several Anolis presentations, with approximately 45 or more talks and posters this year featuring anoles.

Every year at SICB, Anole Annals tries to cover as many of the anole talks and posters as we can, and this year is no exception! AA relies on conference attendees to blog about all of the awesome anole work being presented, with a strong focus on undergraduate and graduate research. If you’re a student or student researcher attending SICB, blogging for AA is a fantastic way of getting experience in communicating science with a broader audience. In addition, if you are presenting work on anoles at SICB this January and want to help us blog, we’ll return the favor and cover your work for the blog! Anybody can join the AA family- undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. If you’re interested in blogging for AA at SICB this year, please shoot me an email at anthony.gilbert09@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post and we can get you going. We can provide assistance, examples, and answer any questions you may have when it comes to blogging for AA. Thanks all!

Test Your Anole Identification Moxie!

By Wolfgang Dahm

On December 9, 2019

In All Posts

I am an enthusiastic hobby photographer. On walks or on vacation I always try to find animals and of course I am happy about every new species.
Among others I have found some Anolis in the last months. I’m not sure about the species or subspecies. That’s why I want to ask the experts for help.
I look forward to your answers. Many thanks in advance and greetings from Cologne, Germany.
Wolfgang

No 1, La Romana, Dom. Republik

No 2, La Romana, Dom. Republik, possibly Anolis distichus properus?

No 3, Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands, possibly Anolis acutus?

No 4, Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands, possibly Anolis acutus?

No 5, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis evermanni?

No 6, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico

No 7, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis evermanni?

No 8, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis cristatellus ?

No 9, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis cristatellus ?

No 10, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico

No 11, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis krugi ?

No 12, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico

No 13, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico

No 14, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis stratulus ?

No 15, Corcovado National park, Costa Rica

No 16, Corcovado National park, Costa Rica

No 17, Corcovado National park, Costa Rica

No 18, Dominica, not far from Roseau, possibly Anolis cristatellus ?

No 19, Grenada, possibly Anolis richardii ?

No 19, Martinique, Chancel, Island, possibly Anolis roquet summus?

Anole Annals 2020 Calendars Now Available!

By Kristin Winchell

On December 6, 2019

In All Posts

1st place: Anolis sagrei by Laurel Robertson

Thank you once again to everyone who participated in this year’s Anole Annals photo contest! As usual, we received tons of great photos, and we’re ready to announce the results. First up, the grand prize winner, is the above photo of Anolis sagrei from Port Saint Lucie, FL taken by Laurel Robertson. The second place winner is below, Anolis chloris from Parque Nacional Natural Tatamá, Colombia, by Jhan Salazar. Congratulations!

2nd place: Anolis chloris by Jhan Salazar

The rest of the winners are below, and their photos can be seen in the 2020 calendar here! Click the link to order your calendar. Do it now to take advantage of the Cyber Week sale – 50% off ending today!