Two male Anole lizards pose and posture in a mock fight display. One individual is distinguished by the regrowth of his tail lost in some previous incident. In this incident, no physical contact seemed to have occurred, but biting and locking of jaws in actual combat has been observed between males of this species. These still photos do not convey the rapid change of posture, circling and feinting of attacks. Finally in the last photo the lizard with the regrown tail is seen alone in a victory pose with legs fully extended and tail held straight off the ground. It should also be noted that while I photographed at no time did I observe either male display its dewlap. This may have occurred in a prelude to their face-off on this urban sidewalk arena.
Category: Natural History Observations Page 22 of 34
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 it here.
Bright green male who won the fightAn instantaneous color change for the loser.
Two adult male A. maynardi were sitting on a flat tile deck about 6 inches apart with dewlaps exposed and head crests up. There was much head bobbing and they showed their bright yellow dewlaps by turning their heads sideways. Then fast wrestling occurred – It looked like they were using their mouths to bite each other — with the participants separating briefly before repeating the wrestling, during which they turned each other over and over. We (humans) may have precipitated the end of this bout by opening a door to get a camera, but one male ran off the deck down the vertical wall and the other stayed to watch. At this point a small female ran between the two towards the male nearest the deck. After 10 minutes the male that moved off first is sitting on a hand rail and has changed to his dark color, while the other male remains on a step still bright green.
Also: a brief note on nocturnal feeding. We had our first decent rain of the season on the 24th April and on coming home at about 8.30 pm, a large cosmopolitan gecko and a male A. maynardi were sharing the same wall and feeding on insects attracted to the outdoor lights.
Fighting carolinensis. Photo from https://twitter.com/#!/tsansmerci/status/183640654881095681/photo/1
Wowie zowie! Check that out. The top carolinensis is holding the other one in mid-air by its jaws. No wonder they have such big heads (female carolinensis heads are much smaller) and such powerful toepads.
Otocryptis wiegmanni. Photo by Akila De Silva from http://lazy-lizard-tales.blogspot.com/2012/01/year-of-dragon-amazing-agamids.html
A while back we had a post discussing the many times lizards have evolved dewlaps, and more recently our mystery lizard was a most anole-like agamid lizard, Sitana ponceriana. Above is a close relative of Sitana, Otocryptis wiegmanni, doing its best anole imitation. Really, someone needs to do a comparative anatomical study of all these dewlaps to see how similar they are in construction–I’m guessing pretty similar!
The photo comes from a cool website, The Lazy Lizard’s Tales, and this particular post is chockful of cool looking agamids
Anolis carolinensis - the green anole. Photo by Neil Losin
The Anolis carolinensis – A. sagrei interaction in the SE United States has been discussed on quite a few occasions on this site (see [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] and others). Anolis carolinensis is the only anole native to the US but A. sagrei has invaded much of the former’s range by inhabiting nearly all of Florida, some of southern Georgia, and parts of Louisiana and Texas. The Anolis community has focused a great deal of attention asking: what is the ecological, behavioral, and evolutionary effect of A. sagrei on A. carolinensis.
A new paper by Jessica Edwards and Simon Lailvaux of the University of New Orleans, “Display behavior and habitat use in single and mixed populations of Anolis carolinensis and Anolis sagrei lizards,” explores this interaction even further.
This young Anolis equestris was enjoying the recent bloom of a royal palm here in south Florida. After the freeze in 2010 there was a sharp decline in Anolis equestris (kill rate perhaps as high as 80%). The Iguana iguana population declined by 95% or more (so much for the “invasive invasion”). What has resulted from this die-off is that now I see many more of these young A. equestris. This particular specimen most likely hatched out last spring, there is also a smaller sized batch that must have hatched out in the fall. This staggered series of young animals is something I had not observed previously. Adult Anolis equestris (particularly the males) are notorious cannibals and young equestris are much slower and less agile than A. sagrei, A. porcatus, and A. distichus which often elude the sprinting attacks of equestris.
There have been a number of citations of equestris eating birds and small rodents. Anolis equestris are opportunistic predators and will undoubtedly take fledglings if possible. I have seen mocking birds chase equestris from trees because they see them as threats, however, their fabled predatory exploits have been largely exaggerated. For nearly forty years I have made numerous field observations of A. equestris in south Florida. What I have found is that they spend their time much like their smaller anolis counterparts snapping up small arthropods. In fact, a fair proportion of their food intake isn’t even animal matter;
Brown anole from Dust Tracks on the Web
Darwin famously pointed out that a surfeit of cats could lead to an abundance of flowers. Janson Jones has transplanted that way of thinking to our favorite study organism, arguing that a population burst in green anoles in Florida is due to an influx of little dogs, whose ceaseless yapping and running amok has knocked brown anoles off their game, allowing the greens to proliferate. Read all about it here.
Animals and/or insects have a very weird yet amazing relationship with each other. Most of the time, a species will be wiped out without the other. When we think of our dogs, we often think about getting them the best life they can have, and we end up buying stuff from www.treehousepuppies.com or from our local pet shops. But nature does not operate that way, instead, it lets the animals and insects fend for themselves with the help of others.
And here’s what Darwin had to say:
Humble bees alone visit red clover, as other bees cannot reach the nectar. It has been suggested that moths may fertilise the clovers; but I doubt whether they could do so in the case of the red clover, from their weight not being sufficient to depress the wing petals.
Hence we may infer as highly probable that, if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great measure upon the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Colonel Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that “more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England.”
Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Colonel Newman says, “Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice.” Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!