Category: Anole Photographs Page 7 of 9

March 2013 was a strange March in my neck of the woods: the American southeast. Down south, we had a number of remarkable cold waves pass through the early-spring season. Though these cold fronts weren’t quite as dramatic as those entirely-scientifically-accurate and precisely-represented megastorms-of-doom depicted in the hit motion picture The Day After Tomorrow, they were still quite impressive in their own right. Definitely more freeze warnings than I’m used to in March… at least in Florida and Georgia. Not so much in Alaska. Up there, it’s frigid mayhem as usual.

Anyhow, at the end of March, my family headed down from Valdosta, Georgia to Mt. Dora, Florida (a bit north/northwest of Orlando in Lake county) to visit with Kid A’s grandparents. There wasn’t too much hiking / outdoor-activity scheduled for that weekend. Easter was the name of the game. Wabbits. Well, Easter wabbits and the season finale of The Walking Dead. Still, as is often the case in central Florida, sometimes you don’t really have to look very far to find some cool stuff, particularly when the weather finally warms up after a delayed and tedious late-winter departure…

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Those of you who noticed when the answer was briefly revealed, please don’t spill the beans. Very few AA readers, or anyone else, have seen this one!

As we have posted previously, the Glor lab has been breeding anoles to assess the degree of reproductive isolation between A. distichus-clade lineages. Most eggs we collect fall into two easily separated categories: white, calcified, viable eggs; and yellow, uncalcified, inviable eggs.  On occasion we get a third type: white, seemingly viable, yet uncalcified eggs. These represent only about 1% of the eggs in our current experiment. We always incubate these, in the hopes that they will develop, but typically they mold early in incubation and, upon dissection, show no signs of fertilization or development. The egg above is our first exception which, when incubated for about 3 weeks, was clearly developing (it has, sadly, since died).

So, AA community, has anyone else seen anything like this?  I would very much like to hear your thoughts, interpretations and comments.

Time for everyone’s favorite parlor game. Your AA correspondents are out in the field, and this turned up. So, which is it? And what species, exactly?

More eye candy for the anole-loving evolutionary biology crowd. This one is a sumptuous photo of A. distichus by inspired photographer and AA contributor Miguel Landestoy, advertising February 2013 Evolution readers to the presence of a paper on dewlap color by Julienne Ng and colleagues, about which we have already reported.

Astute readers will realize that this is the fourth time since mid-2010 that Evolution‘s editors have had the wisdom to put an anole on the cover. Anyone remember seeing a stickleback or cichlid there?

Photo by Brian Arbogast

Brian Arbogast sent these photos with a request for identification. I have my guesses, but I thought I’d throw it out to the experts. Here’s what Brian had to say: “They were taken in the lower cloud forest of Sumaco Volcano, on the eastern slope of the Andes in Ecuador at about 1700-1800m in elevation.”

Photo by Brian Arbogast

The SICB (Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology) meeting is right around the corner! Right after the New Year, many anolologists (including me!) will be heading out to San Francisco to learn what’s new and exciting in Anolis research. In addition to blogging about all the anole posters and presentations I attend, I will be giving a talk about some research I conducted on the evolution of thermal tolerances in anoles. I’ve been working hard to get this talk into shape, but I’m woefully lacking a nice photograph of the Central American semi-aquatic anole, A. lionotus. Would anyone out there be willing to share a nice, clear photo of this lizard with me? I would give you credit for it, of course, and it would greatly help me out.

You can contact me at mmunoz@oeb.harvard.edu or through the comments section of this post. Thanks so much and happy holidays!

Eric Enrique Flores de Gracia, a Panamanian graduate student based in the UK, sends in the following. Can anyone help?:

Besides my own Ph.D. research focus, I like to explore and monitor biodiversity of amphibians and reptiles among others, in the central mountains of Panama (part of the Talamanca eco-region). During a field campaign in the buffer zone of the Santa Fe National Park, we found a curious lizard on a Nispero (Terminalia amazonica) tree. Sadly, we were running out of time and only took the attached picture and since our main focus was not to survey herps at that moment, we released the lizard. I will appreciate if you have any clue as to what species it could be? By the way, we started a small monitoring program in 2011 in a never before explored area with some students from the University in Veraguas province.

You would have thought that Anolis allisoni couldn’t get any more handsome!

This one from Susan Perkins will be hard to top.