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Thank you to all who sent in photos for our contest; we received a total of 101 submissions! We’ve tallied the results and consulted our panel of experts, and are ready to announce the winners for Anoles 2017. The grand prize winner is the photo above, Anolis equestris potior, taken by Jesús Reina Carvajal. The second place winner is below, Anolis aquaticus, taken by Lindsey Swierk. Congratulations!

The rest of the winners can be seen in the 2017 calendar here! Click the link to order your calendar, just in time for the holidays. Congratulations to all the winners, and thank you again to everyone who participated!

Happy holidays! Can’t wait to see the submissions next year!

A newborn anole arrives in November. Photo by Karen Cusick

Who says global warming is such a bad thing? Ok, it is, but at least there are some benefits, especially if you’re a brown anole in Florida. Read all about it in Daffodil’s Photo Blog.

The American Museum of Natural History just opened an exhibit on anoles that also presents information on the natural history and culture of Cuba. Or maybe it’s the other way around. But either way, you have to love their logo. The New York Times just reviewed the exhibit, and not surprisingly, anoles were a centerpiece of the article.

And here’s some text from the article:

From the recent ISBE Newsletter (28:2, p.26).

The artist, Ken Otter, who when not drawing is a professor at the University of Northern British Columbia, explains the back-story:

My first love was reptiles – birds came as a later incarnation (although I console myself that they are simply feathered reptiles).  I was actually planning on shifting to working on anoles during my postdoc.  I have had numerous ones as pets over the years – my students gave me a brown anole that became our lab mascot for about 5 years.  I even had an undergrad student at the University of Nottingham that I was co-supervising with Pete McGregor run trials to see if males eavesdrop on dewlap displays of other males. Unfortunately, the student was primarily focused on nature photography, and we had a miscommunication on scientific design.  I found out after the fact that he hadn’t quite followed protocol, so we couldn’t count all our trials, so the results were only ever presented in a conference poster and not published.  He ended up as a photographer for BBC Wildlife though!

I had actually been awarded a short-term postdoc back in the 90s from the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour to test anole signalling behaviour using video playback systems (very similar to the stuff that has since been done using Robo-lizards).  Unfortunately, it came at the same time as I was offered a tenure track job here, and the University had a ‘northern research focus’ so wasn’t too keen on me heading off to the Caribbean to do field work.  Guess now that I have full professorship I could always tell them to stuff themselves, but I have my research program set up now!  Still find dewlap displaying fascinating, especially with the added component of UV signalling in the mix.  That aspect parallels a lot of the stuff with bird signalling.  The fact that males are in such close proximity and can see at least silhouettes of others displaying give a certain network component that Pete and I were always interested in pursuing, but just never go around to it.  Still occupies my thoughts (hence the cartoons) and talk about it in my lectures, but guess I will have to wait to put it into field practice!  Still, next North American Ornithological Congress in 2020 is being held in Puerto Rico….

And here’s another of his drawings:

Read all about it at Ricardo’s Blog.

Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

It’s late November, which means a few things: Winter is coming, Westworld is wrapping up, people are going to lose their minds on Black Friday, and, most importantly, the annual meeting for the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) is upon us. SICB is one the biggest annual meetings for biologists in the United States, and it is a venue where Anolis research is prominently featured. This year’s meeting, which will be held in New Orleans during the first week of January, is no exception. By my count there are 35 talks and posters featuring anoles. I’ve been attending this meeting regularly for nearly a decade and I’m fairly certain this is a new record. I think that this particularly high turnout really speaks to the increasing prominence of anoles as model organisms for ecological and evolutionary studies.

With great prominence, however, comes great responsibility. We like to cover every presentation, whenever possible and also focus on giving spotlights to undergraduates and graduate students as much as possible. Every year we rely on many conference participants to blog about posters and talks. If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student, blogging is a great way to practice writing to a broader audience. Moreover, if you blog for AA and are presenting at SICB, we guarantee that we will cover your presentation. Bloggers at all levels of experience are welcome to blog – undergrads, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty! Please email me at mmm109@duke.edu or leave a comment for this post if you’re interested in blogging for AA at SICB and we’ll get you started. I will provide detailed information on how to blog and will also be at the conference (and blogging for AA) and can provide assistance. See this post from SICB 2016 for an example. Thanks very much!

Earlier this year, we reported that researchers had split the four species of green anoles on Hispaniolia, describing 12 new species. Wasting no time–and with much beauty–the Dominican Republic has placed four of these new species on stamps! Thanks to the world’s authority on anoles on stamps, Uwe Bartelt, for bringing this to our attention.

Thank you to everyone who submitted photos for the Anole Annals 2016 calendar contest, we received so many great submissions! We’ve narrowed it down to the top 30, and now it’s time to vote! Choose your 5 favorites in the poll below. You can click on the thumbnail to view full-size images. You have 5 days to vote – poll closes on Monday at midnight (11/21).

Anolis carolinensis basking mid-winter in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Note the icicle in the left foreground. Photo by Sandy Echternacht from The Reptiles of Tennessee (UT Press 2013), and used with permission of the photographer and publisher.

Having recently moved to North Carolina, I am naturally inclined to get out and look for anoles. The state encompasses portions of the northern extent of the green anole (Anolis carolinensis) along the eastern seaboard, and a number of researchers are interested in both the evolutionary history of green anoles (Tollis et al. 2012, Campbell-Staton et al. 2012, Tollis and Boissinot 2014; Manthey et al. 2016) as well as, in particular, their ability to adapt to highly season regions (Jaffe et al. 2016). For a subtropical lizard to survive in areas that regularly see snow and ice is potentially an important study in regional adaptation. Indeed, this dramatic photograph below illustrates that anoles and icicles can coexist in both space and time.

This comes from work done by Sandy Echternacht and David Bishop at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. These researchers have shown that the green anoles in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (yes, they occur there!) exist mostly on south-facing rocky slopes, and that they do not hibernate during the colder months. Instead, they will often bask on the rock faces when the sun shines directly on the rock (even when ambient temperatures are near freezing). During warmer months, the lizards move from overwintering sites into the forest, often along rivers (Bishop and Echternacht 2003, 2004). South of the Park, this species can be found in abundance along the banks of larger rivers.

North Carolina GAP Analysis Project

In North Carolina, green anoles range up the Atlantic coast to Virginia, but have a more jagged latitudinal distribution moving west across the state. Known records (Palmer and Braswell 1995) decline in latitude as one approaches the city of Charlotte from the east, tapering to just barely north of the South Carolina border. Then, some curious incursions and apparently disjunct populations are recorded from west of the I-77 corridor (what generally constitutes Western North Carolina).

Anolis carolinensis from Chimney Rock, NC.

With one season under the belt, so to speak, my Herpetology class at the University of North Carolina Asheville and I have found what we think might be the closest population of green anoles to Asheville, North Carolina. This population occurs in a steep valley near Chimney Rock, North Carolina. Interestingly, they have access to steep south-facing rocky slopes above the valley. I thought I would poll the group and see if anyone has any hot tips on anole populations in the east Tennessee/Western North Carolina region. We are considering making this a Herpetology class project in the future- to map out the anole populations in this part of the state to see if they are in fact disjunct and whether any additional populations can be found. We will keep AA posted.

Recently, the book Invasion Genetics: the Baker & Stebbins legacy was published online, covering various aspects of the evolutionary biology of invasive plant, animal, fungus and microbe species. One chapter, coauthored by myself, will particularly appeal to Anole Annals readers, as it provides an extensive review of the genetic, evolutionary and ecological differences between exotic and native anole species. Anoles are highly appropriate for a book on invasion genetics, because of the large body of research on both the genotype and phenotype of anoles, the many species that have exhibited the ability to establish populations outside of their native range, and the exponentially increasing number of exotic anole populations since the onset and intensification of travel and trade in the Caribbean and across the world.

The chapter contrasts what is known about the natural dispersal and colonization processes of Caribbean native anoles to the human‐mediated translocation of exotic anoles in the Anthropocene. Previously, natural colonization events rarely occurred, whereas the rate of new (exotic) anole colonizations has increased drastically. The main argument of the chapter is that the many exotic introductions have eroded the previously strong biogeographic structure of anole assemblages.

An exotic crested anole male (Anolis cristatellus) on the island of St. Martin. (photographer: Wendy Jesse)

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