Category: Introduced Anoles

Anolis leachi, one of many Lesser Antillean anoles that have been successfully introduced to areas where they don't occur naturally.

In a companion paper to Poe et al. (Evolution, 2011), Latella et al. examine a variety of attributes of the 19 species of anoles that have been successfully introduced to new areas and compare them to a large number of never naturalized anoles.  Successful invaders differ in many ways from those who’ve never taken the leap or failed trying, including being larger, having larger scales on the snout, being more sexually dimorphic, occurring at lower elevations, occurring in the Lesser Antilles or near a major port and, among Greater Antillean species, having a large geographic range size. Multivariate analysis considering all these variables, however, indicates that the best predictors are a combination of body size, geographic range, and place of occurrence. This multivariate model not only accounts for which species have become established, but can make predictions about which species may be next. High on the list: the large Lesser Antillean A. bimaculatus and A. griseus and the widespread Hispaniolan grass anole, A. semilineatus. The only other highly likely, non-Lesser Antillean invader among the top nine was, surprisingly to my mind, the Jamaican twig anole, A. valencienni, which, on esthetic grounds, would also be highly ranked.

In looking at the list of introduced species, two not very brilliant observations came to mind. First, many introduced species are from the Lesser Antilles, but they’ve also been introduced to other Lesser Antillean islands. Is that due to geographic proximity and high rates of inter-Lesser Antillean island traffic and commerce, or is it because the Lesser Antilles never have more than two native species? Along these lines, second, most anole introductions are to areas that are depauperate in anoles, whereas very few have occurred in richer areas. This, of course, accords with classic  competition theory, but there are other explanations.

Last Thursday, the Kokua Line column of the Honolulu Star Advertiser fielded a question on how to get rid of brown anoles. The answer was: no way (the officer at the state Vector Control Branch told the author that if she found out “how to eradicate these lizards, to be sure to call him back and let him know.”). However, the local citizenry disagreed, and in the 23 comments (see below), provided a number of solutions, as well as debate on the wisdom of anole eradication. Several readers also made the claim, echoing that heard in Florida and discussed here, that brown anoles supplant greens (also introduced to Hawaii).

get a couple of cats.  all the cats i’ve ever had have taken care of the b52s*, birds, mice and rats, geckos of every stripe, etc.  had one that would bring all her mice/rat kills very proudly to the front door mat and leave them there while purring for applause.  she was a very efficient killer.

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                 *Editor’s Note: according to my friend, Dan Devaney, “b52s” refers to “Hawaii’s unofficial state bird, the B-52 Flying Cockroach.” For more information, go here.

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In what can legitimately be called a taxonomic coup, an Anolis lizard has stolen the cover of Evolution for the third time in 8 months.  That’s right folks – 3 out of the last 8 Evolution covers have been anoles (see our coverage of past covers here).

The latest, from the April 2011 issue of Evolution, highlights a new paper by Steve Poe and company about the relationship between deep evolutionary history and recent naturalization success in anoles. The punch line is that anole species endemic to single-species islands share a suite of traits with anoles that have become naturalized outside of their native ranges. Furthermore, the traits of such ‘solitary anoles’ may be used to predict naturalization more generally within Anolis. It’s an interesting paper and it demonstrates the utility of phylogenetic “tree-thinking” in matters relevant to conservation biology. Poe et al. go one step further though, provocatively suggesting that human-mediated anole invasions simply represent the acceleration of already-present ecological and evolutionary processes, and that humans have changed “the tempo, rather than the essence, of omnipresent natural processes” (p. 1200).

Here’s a bigger image of the anole on the cover, courtesy of Steve Poe.  It’s Anolis kunayale, which was described by Erik Hulebak and colleagues in 2007.