Nathan Dappen and Neil Losin of Day’s Edge Productions include anoles once again in their latest video. Enjoy!
Category: Education and Anoles Page 3 of 4
There are lofty goals, and then there is the Encyclopedia of Life. In case you haven’t heard of it yet, the Encyclopedia of Life is an international initiative to provide free access to detailed information about all the world’s species. The Encyclopedia of Life, or EOL, has 180 content partners, information from nearly 1,000 collections, over 750,000 species pages and more than 600,000 species images. To date EOL has drawn over 5 million viewers from across the globe.
Two years ago I got to participate in this project by helping to write pages for Anolis species as part of a class project for Harvard’s Herpetology course. In all the unbridled enthusiasm and the sense of endless time that comes with being a young graduate student, I decided that doing a single species page would not be nearly as exciting as describing an entire clade of anoles. Because I knew I would be working extensively with the cybotoids, a clade composed of the trunk-ground anoles from Hispaniola that is so near and dear to my heart, I decided to write pages for the whole group. When I embarked on this journey my list included A. armouri, A. cybotes, A. haetianus, A. longitibialis, A. marcanoi, A. strahmi, A. shrevei, and A. whitemani.
A couple of years ago I got interested in photographing the brown anoles in my yard in northeast Florida, where we have lots of anoles. I’m not a scientist–I’m a high school special education teacher–and I didn’t know much about anoles, so I began looking up information and learning about them. I ended up with lots of photos and information about anoles and I decided to put together a little book about anoles for kids. Kids in this area see anoles all the time, and I thought they’d be interested in knowing more about them.
I self-published “Lizards on the Fence” at Blurb and I’ve sold and given copies to other teachers, friends, and neighbors. People have told me that their kids or grandkids will take the book out in the yard and compare the photos to the anoles they see, identifying them as males or females, commenting on their dewlaps, and watching young anoles grow. The 10-year-old son of a staff member at my school told his mother, “Mom, this inspires me! Can I have a camera? I want to write a book too!” Maybe a future herpetologist there!
If anyone would like to see the book, there’s a good-sized preview at Blurb. Here is the link: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/603481
I was so happy to find Anole Annals with so much information about anoles! I’m considering going back and working on the book again, revising and adding more photos, so comments are very welcome.
Read all about Project Noah, a citizen science initiative, and their recent good judgment in featuring Anolis.
As anole specialists we sometimes overlook how exciting our animals can be to other biologists and the general public. After returning to campus with a male Anolis equestris yesterday the people on my floor were amazed by this animal (granted they work on fruit flies). Photos were taken and shared with friends. While we would likely default to using cut and dry adjectives to describe most lizards, I think that the quote below demonstrates well the emotions that a non-scientist feels when observing a giant green lizard.
“OMFG! Is it just me or is that a freaking gorgeous animal? Look underneath it’s feet, the rubber part of the toes! aww. I cant get over it’s chin..Why do Lizards have that elongated loose neck…what is it called and is it used for digesting food? Your camera takes great photos. squishy and i wanna kissy. 🙂
Ok I’ll stop”
Thanks to Didem Sarikaya for passing this along. Didem’s photo is below.
If you’ve read papers published over the last few years on Anolis diversification, you’ve likely noticed a common pattern: the papers present sophisticated analyses of macroevolutionary patterns that were conducted in R (for instance: 1, 2, and see this teaser for the promise of R with GIS data). If you’ve contemplated how to introduce yourself to R and get over the initial hurdles of writing code for your own research, opportunity is-a-knock’n.
Co-organizer Luke Harmon invites you to apply to the 2012 Workshop on Comparative Methods in R today!
Over the last few years, Michael Alfaro and Luke Harmon have organized a wonderful workshop on macroevolutionary methods in the R programming language for statistical computing. They’ve just released the application for this year’s course. I had the privilege of attending last year and found it to be an enriching experience on several fronts.
Previous contributors have discussed the use of Anolis as an educational tool at the K-12 level (see here and here). But what happens when teachers don’t take anoles to the students? The answer is quite simple: the kids bring the anoles to them! Alex C., a sixth grader who recently graduated from my brother’s fifth grade class in PA, just passed along a “Discovery Quest” presentation that he created for fun (and to learn, of course). The topic: Green Anoles! I think it’s safe to say that our favorite lizards have so effectively permeated mainstream culture that the recruitment of anole biologists should prove an easy task from here on out. We look forward to having you in the field in about a decade, Alex C. (and all you other future anole experts)!
Anyone else with stories of anole addictions beginning at a young age? These can be auto-biographical or about those you know!
iNaturalist.org is an on-line community for naturalists where you can “record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world.” We’ve teamed with iNaturalist to provide a new anole-specific widget that allows our readers to see previously reported anole records and add records of their own to iNaturalist’s growing on-line database. Check out our new Citizen Science page to give the iNaturalist widget a spin!
Anolis smaragdinus is one of the species that participants in Bob Powell's REU program are likely to encounter on their trip to Eleuthera this Summer. Photo by Jonathan Losos
Are you an undergraduate student with dreams of traveling to the Caribbean to study lizards? If so, your dream could be realized through the NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program organized by Bob Powell at Avila University. Now in its 10th iteration, Bob’s program has provided nearly 100 students with opportunities to conduct research in places like the Dominican Republic, Anguilla, Grenada, St. Eustatius, St. Vincent, Dominica and the Grenadines. I can tell you from personal experience – I was a participant in 1995 – that Bob’s program is among the best of its kind. Students in Bob’s REU get a complete research experience, from personal instruction on how to find and read the primary literature to supervised preparation of research for publication. Just about everyone who participates in Bob’s program comes out with one or more publications. This summer’s REU will involve field work on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, which is home to four species of anoles! Applications are due by February 15th.
