Education and Anoles – Page 4

A fifth grade teacher prepares for a lizard sprint trial. (Notice the two different perches in the cage in the foreground.)

A few days ago, I posted a description of an anole-based project I assign in my college Evolution course, but of course, anoles are fascinating to students of all ages! In this post, I’ll describe materials I developed this summer as part of Trinity University’s Science Teaching Institute, teaching 20 San Antonio fifth-grade science teachers to use green anoles (Anolis carolinensis) in their classrooms. These materials were specifically designed to meet Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards, but I expect they would be appropriate for many elementary school science classes.

Teaching With Anoles, Part 1

By mjohnson216

On August 20, 2011

In Education and Anoles

As the summer is ending and a new semester is beginning, your thoughts may have returned to teaching. I try to use a diversity of taxonomic groups in my lectures and labs, but of course, I find anoles to be useful examples for many topics in the classroom. In my Evolution course, taught each year to biology majors at Trinity University, I focus one laboratory module on anole evolution to teach my students to conduct phylogenetically-informed comparative analyses. Below, I’ll describe the approach I use in my course, and if you would like to see my materials, or adapt them for your own teaching, I’d be happy to share the lab handouts – just email me at michele.johnson[at]trinity.edu.

Many activities in my lecture and lab focus on creating and interpreting phylogenies, and one of my earliest lab sessions teaches students to use parsimony and similarity-based classification to build phylogenies from mammalian morphological traits.

Anolis Ecomorph Visualization App

By Jonathan Losos

On July 6, 2011

In Education and Anoles

CAnolis is a freely downloadable visualization app for learning about Caribbean anole evolution, built using the Processing programming language. Its main purpose is to help teachers of evolution explain convergence and adaptive radiation to high school
and college students. It does so by allowing viewers to click on an island and see where on the phylogeny species in different ecomorphs occur.

Fernando Racimo, creator of the App, explains how it came to be: “The inspiration for the program came after taking a Herpetology class at Harvard, but I didn’t have the means to create it until a friend introduced me to a visually-oriented Java-based programming
language called Processing. I obtained the list of anoles and the clade phylogeny from Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree, while the ecomorph drawings came from a classroom exercise available at the University of California Museum of Paleontology’s website and mentioned earlier in the Anole Annals. My objective was to link island distribution,
phylogenetic placement and ecological adaptation into a single interactive program that made it easy for users to understand how different species of anoles evolved in each island. Jonathan Losos, Mickey Eagleson and Sami Majadla kindly provided advice on how best to display the information.”

The App can be downloaded here:

CAnolis for Mac: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17593686/CAnolis%20for%20Mac.zip

CAnolis for Windows: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17593686/CAnolis%20for%20Windows.zip

Please email fernandoracimo@gmail.com if you have any comments or suggestions for improvements.