Category: Anoles in Commerce Page 3 of 4

A year ago, AA lamented that in Costa Rica, land full of wonderful anoles, there was scarcely an anole piece of merchandise for the anole-entranced ecotourist to purchase. More recently, we commented that not only was the same true in the Dominican Republic, another bastion of anolishness, but that tourist marts were full of merchandise sporting green iguanas, an invasive species in that country.

On my recent trip to Aruba and Curaçao in quest of A. lineatus, I took time out to survey the lizard merchandise situation. Intrepidly venturing into one souvenir shop after another, powering through crowded stalls in outdoor crafts marts, I comprehensively surveyed the supply of schlock, tchotke and junk. It wasn’t easy, but I got through it all. And the result is clear: despite their prehistoric ugliness, green iguanas are all the rage.

Iguanas out of control in the ABC Islands.

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Several days ago, I challenged Anole Annals readers to identify the three problems with this stamp, issued by Grenada and other nearby islands in their “Reptiles of the Caribbean” series… The answers were creative and insightful, and identified some issues that I had missed. And readers even picked up on one problem I thought would elude them. So what are the problems to which I referred?

The photograph is of a male Anolis grahami.

Problem #1: A. grahami is from Jamaica. Why is it on a stamp from Grenada? This was the gimme.

Problem #2: This individual actually was from Bermuda, where A. grahami was introduced in 1905. Bermuda, of course, is not in the Caribbean. This was the tough one that no one realized.

Problem #3: This is my photograph, used without my permission! Don’t believe me? Here’s the unabridged version, which appears on Todd Jackman’s Anolis webpage, which Todd speculates, probably correctly, is where the Grenadians got it:

I can assure you that I never granted permission for its use, and until I stumbled across it on the internet, I was unaware that it had been planted on a $6 stamp (royalties—ka-ching!). Does anyone know a good intellectual property rights lawyer with offices in the Lesser Antilles?

It turns out, however, that kerfuffles with anoles and postage stamps are not unheard of. Here’s another, brought to my attention by Uwe Bartelt, rumored to be the world’s leading anole philatelist.

Anole Annals is proud to bring you its newly produced 2012 calendar. Featuring photographs of 13 different anole species taken by world-renowned wildlife photographers and biologists, the calendar is the perfect holiday gift. Moreover, today happens to be 1/2 price Calendar Monday, so order immediately!

Doing a little holiday shopping yesterday at Barnes & Noble and came across Snakes and Reptiles: The Scariest Cold-Blooded Creatures on Earth on the bargain table. The drawings are charming and the material seems pretty factual (from a quick skim), but most importantly, an anole was included! At only $9.98, it seemed like a bargain, and you can get it for even less at Barnes & Noble’s website. Looks like a good present for young herpetologists or even older ones.

Anole in amber--but how old?

The fossil record of anoles is disappointingly small. Other than very young (a few thousand years old) fossils found in caves, where owls and other predators may have left them, only four full-fledged fossils are known from the scientific literature. All are lizards preserved in amber, approximately 20 million years old (give or take a few million). Here’s a picture of one here.

But there are a lot more in private hands. The problem, however, is Jurassic Park. Remember how the mad scientists got their dinosaur DNA? They extracted it from mosquitoes entombed in amber. And where did the amber come from? Perhaps you recall the scene of the lawyer (later justifiably devoured by T. rex) getting off a river raft to purchase some amber. Where? The Dominican Republic. And it turns out that those amber mines do exist, only their deposits date to the Miocene, not the Cretaceous. And, more importantly, as well as skeeters and other invertebrates, occasionally an anole-laden piece of amber emerges from these mines.

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Ann Melton’s Galloping Snail Studio in Georgia features beautiful and accurate natural sculptures in ceramic, stoneware and pewter including an anole pin, figurine, letter opener, jar and vase.  She describes her artistic journey as beginning with “…clay at an early age and over time developed a wide range of ceramic techniques.  I began formal ceramic studies in Manises, Spain.  At Mountain Empire Community College I participated in an intense two year Studio Potter program.  Then went on to graduate from Virginia Commonwealth University with a Bachelor of Fine Art.  For 10 years I designed for an international pewter company.  I now live on Melton Farm in Beachton, Georgia and work out of “Galloping Snail Studio” where I combine the two disciplines.  The resulting work is both functional and decorative which savor the uniqueness of the red hills region.” Her work can be purchased directly at her website or at sportingartisans.com

Ann Melton’s Anole Pin or Figurine

T-shirts photographed in gift shops in the Santo Domingo airport (left and center), and a guy wearing a Punta Cana iguana t-shirt photographed during a layover in Atlanta (right).

We’ve previously discussed how difficult it is to find gifts featuring anoles (aside from some cafepress fare).  Even more depressing is the fact that introduced green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are regular features on gift shop fare in the Dominican Republic, a country with one of the coolest of all anole faunas.  Heck, there aren’t even shirts with the native rock iguanas (Cyclura)!  We really need to recruit an entrepreneur to start making Dominican paraphenalia featuring endemic wildlife.

Outside the Cambridge Common on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge. Bonus points: name the famous evolutionary biologist (hint: he has an accent).

On Massachusetts Avenue, halfway between Harvard and Porter Squares in Cambridge, can be found  a restaurant, Cambridge Common, which serves a tasty burger and decent fries, and plenty of good beer. What makes this restaurant really stand out, however, is its downstairs auditorium for live music, the Lizard Lounge (described by the Boston Globe on the lounge’s website as “a bordello parlor-like space of red velvet, Persian rugs, and [a] fringe, and ethnically diverse and uniformly young and hip crowd”). And even more winsome, plastered across the front wall of the building, facing traffic (and doubtless the cause of many accidents resulting from the gawking of bewitched drivers), is a much larger than life, oddly colored photograph of Anolis carolinensis.

Questions abound. Why, for example, did the CC decide about a year ago to remove the charming painting of a day gecko and replace it with the colorized green anole photo? And whence the name “Lizard Lounge”? I’d send you to their website, but it’s uninformative on these important matters.

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The Hamm Reptile Show, operated by Terraristika Hamm, is said to be the largest reptile expo in the world. Several shows are held a year, the most recent 2½ weeks ago. One AA correspondent reports there were “plenty of captive bred anole species. For example: barbatus, porcus, valencienni, noblei, bartschi, roquet, baracoae, allisoni. I think more than 25 species available just on this show.” It’s surprisingly hard to get information on the show on the internet. Can any of our readers tell us more?