Stroud and Beckles published this photo of a crested anole with a half-grey dewlap in the December 2014 issue of Herpetological Review. Cresteds dewlaps are usually orange or yellow–this is very unusual.
This is reminiscent of the famous gray-dewlapped A. carolinensis as well as this odd crested anole found by Neil Losin.
What’s up with these wacky anoles?
Congratulations to our friends at Tropical Herping for their photo in this month’s National Geographic.
Approach to Great Isaac Cay. Note the Casuarina forest. Photo by Kristin Winchell.
Great Isaac Cay, NE of the Bimini group, Bahamas. Image from Google Earth 2015.
As Kristin mentioned in a previous post, we recently visited some of the Bimini islands in search of data on Anolis sagrei ordinatus. Through a stroke of luck, we were able to visit remote Great Isaac Cay for an afternoon of herping, hoping to find some anoles there.
Great Isaac is a small weathered carbonate formation, rising perhaps 15m above the extreme northwestern corner of the shallow Great Bahama Bank. The island was more or less continuously inhabited for about a century by a lighthouse-keeper staff, and hence the native fauna could have been drastically affected. The island is frequently visited by boaters who come ashore to explore the ruins, as well as Bahamian commercial fisherman (note the boat in the right of the photo) who use the structures for shelter. The island now has a well developed Casuarina forest, with a deep (50-150cm) litter of Casuarina twigs.
The author surveying the Casuarina forest on Great Isaac. Photo by Kristin Winchell.
We spent about six person-hours around 1500h on Great Isaac- plenty of time to cover the entire island. We surveyed for reptiles by lifting and replacing loose rocks, as well as checking around and under vegetation and within abandoned structures. We failed to turn up a single anole, though we did find two species of reptiles. We encountered quite a few Sphaerodactylus nigropunctatus flavicauda under rocks in the Casuarina forest, and only two Ameiva auberi richmondi in open areas around the abandoned lighthouse.
Surveying the west end of Great Isaac Cay. Photo by Kristin Winchell.
Sphaerodactylus nigropunctatus flavicauda, female. Great Isaac Cay.
As far as we can tell there are no island lists of the herpetofauna for Great Isaac, indeed we did not even include the island in our recent list of Bahamian herpetofauna (available here). The island is at least listed in the original version of this work, yet without any records. So, has anyone else come across herpetofaunal records for Great Isaac Cay?
Anolis sagrei with a regrown tail. Photo by Philip Fortman
Kristin Winchell has the answer. Check it out on her blog, Adaptability. Here’s a shot of the poster she discusses:
Compared with our extensive knowledge of male-male interactions, we know very little about how females interact with one another. Adding to a growing set of observations, here is some video (taken by my field assistant and seasoned anole videographer Jon Suh) of two bead-tagged female brown anoles mid-battle.
Both females are recent arrivals to this particular tree, and the lizard that remains on the tree at the end is marginally bigger than the one who leaves. Though I don’t think we witnessed the full interaction, I think it’s interesting that the females didn’t use their dewlaps in the course of this fight. This seems to match up with Ellee Cook’s description of a fight between two female A. gundlachi. The use of the dewlap by females has been observed during male-female interactions in A. cristatellus, A. armouri and a few other species, but also during female-female interactions in some Central American anoles. Clearly we’ve got a long way to go before we characterize and understand agonistic encounters and display behaviour in female anoles!
Liam Revell writes:
My co-authors (Luke Mahler, Graham Reynolds, & Graham Slater) and I recently presented a ‘new’ method for placing recently extinct taxa into a backbone molecular phylogeny on the basis of quantitative trait data. I say ‘new’ with quotes, because our methods derives closely, with full credit given where due, from a Maximum Likelihood phylogeny inference approach presented originally by Felsenstein (1981, 2002).
The idea is basically as follows. We start with a time-calibrated molecular phylogeny containing N – 1 species, and a single taxon of interest (the Nth taxon) whose placement in the tree is of interest, but for which molecular characters are missing. If we have quantitative trait data from one or more characters for all N species in the tree, we can use an approach based on Felsenstein (1981) to add this taxon to our base phylogeny using the statistical criterion of Maximum Likelihood.
In our article (Revell et al. 2015), we demonstrate that the method works pretty well in theory. In fact, for more than a few quantitative characters & particularly for trees of large size, the method often places the missing taxon in our dataset in a topological position that is identical to its true position. (See figure below, reproduced from our article.) In the figure, white bars show the performance of our method (compared to grey bars which represent placement at random). In all cases, lower values indicate that the estimated tree is closer to the generating tree.
The question you’re probably asking yourself (and quite rightly so) is: what could this possibly have to do with anoles? The answer is that we applied the method to the unusual case of Anolis roosevelti. Anolis roosevelti, as many readers of this blog likely already know, is a mysterious crown-giant anole from Culebra and (probably) the Spanish, U.S., and British Virgin Islands, excluding St. Croix. It is only known from a few specimens and was last collected in 1932. Aside from some unconfirmed reports, it has neither been seen nor heard from since. Unfortunately – and tragically given the impressive nature of this creature – all but the most optimistic anole biologists agree that this species is most likely extinct. (Many of us, the author included, still holds out hope, of course.) The figure below shows the type specimen of this impressive creature. (Figure from our article and image courtesy of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.)
Since no prior investigator has collected molecular characters from this species, and the prospects for so doing in the future are somewhat mixed (for reasons that we explain in the article), we thought Anolis roosevelti would represent an interesting test case for our method. Would A. roosevelti, we asked ourselves, fall out as sister to the Puerto Rican crown-giant, Anolis cuvieri, as sister-to or nested-within the rest of Puerto Rican anoles, or in another part of the tree entirely?
Cabela’s telescopic panfish poles (in both 10′ and 12′ versions) are currently on sale, reduced from $27.99 to $17.49 per pole. These are currently regarded as the best product in the anole noosing game (1,2,3).
Telescopic panfish poles on sale here.
Get them while you can!
Bill Schlesinger, one of the world’s most eminent biogeochemists and President Emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies, turns out to have an eagle eye for anoles. While on a birding trip to Puerto Rico, his wife, writer Lisa Dellwo, snapped the photos below in the rainforest in the west central part of the island. Which species are they?
Piero Angeli Ruschi from the Ornithology Department in the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro sent the pictures of Anolis punctatus shown here. His story:
It’s raining lizards!
“These are the pictures that I took of one of the Anolis specimens that had fallen that day. They fell from the canopy straight to open ground over an area of ~70 squared meters. About 10 specimens fell within ~3 min. It happened in Santa Lucia Ecological Station, at Santa Teresa, ES, Brazil in late september 2007 during the afternoom while I monitored a woodpecker nest.
The individuals were all the same as the one in that picture…green with a yellow circle around the eye…Those pictures might even include more than one individual—I am not sure if the one photographed on the ground was the same I captured (they stayed knocked out for a minute or so before running from where they landed).
I wish I had more data to publish a communication about it, as well as more evidence to explain the cause of it. My ornithological background leads me to the alternative hypothesis of some sort of “arena,” but I have no idea if such thing can be expected for these lizards.”
Piero Angeli Ruschi in his day job observing birds
At the risk of developing the reputation of being the harbinger of bad news, I’m here to report what seems to be an epidemic of sorts afflicting the green anoles in Gainesville, FL. In the last two years in this town, veteran AA correspondent Thom Sanger and I have noticed a number of very sickly and dead Anolis carolinensis. Here are some photos from last summer:
A sickly green anole that died the next morning. Photo by Thom Sanger.
We saw these animals in the later summer months, and Thom wondered if they might have died from ingesting insects that had been contaminated with insecticides sprayed to control mosquitoes. But a few days ago, my field assistant Jon Suh saw another mysteriously dead green anole, and it’s too early in the year for it to be explained by pesticide. This was in my fieldsite in the UF campus, where I haven’t seen any cats. The lizard also didn’t appear to have any botflies or other large parasites on it (though I’m not sure what that blue spot is…).
It’s worth noting that we have seen no dead brown anoles in the same sites, so it appears that the cause of these lizards’ demise is species specific. Also, we haven’t noticed any dead lizards in the state parks just outside the city, so it seems to be specific to urban areas. Does anyone have any ideas about what might be afflicting these lizards?
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