Here’s another highlight from the collection of videos that the Glor Lab recorded during an expedition in the summer of 2010 (see our previously posted videos of a fight, color change, and mating). This video is an interaction between a male Anolis distichus and a caterpillar. This interaction left one of the participants with a good meal and the other, well, let’s just say he’s a part of the circle of life.
Category: Natural History Observations Page 26 of 34
We’re certainly not shy about posting on our favorite lizards being eaten by other organisms (see this post and links therein). Heck, we’ve even posted on anoles being eaten by plants and insects. However, I can’t help but be a bit disturbed by videos posted online that show anoles being used as food for captive chameleons (1, 2, 3, and many others). Although many of the videos start with the anole already in the much large chameleons mouth, at least one of these videos shows a large veiled chameleon using its tongue to catch the anole (1, 2). A giant sticky tongue is not likely something anoles have evolved any defenses against.
Check out what Janson Jones has to say about the largest anole, as well as a cool video, here.
Here’s a close up of the Anolis hendersoni I found sleeping one fateful night inside the Dominican Republic.
Anolis hendersoni - male
Prior to finding this species, I had spent the evening looking for Sphaerodactylus armstrongi and S. streptophorus on the northern slopes of the Sierra de Bahoruco NW of Puerto Escondido. Upon entering a patch of closed-canopy, broad-leafed forest with a dense, bushy understory, I remarked to myself, “I bet there will be Anolis bahorucoensis here.” Anolis bahorucoensis is a bush anole that is common across the Sierra de Bahoruco, and often found alongside S. armstrongi. I was not expecting to see A. hendersoni – another dolichocephalic bush dwelling species that is closely related to A. bahorucoensis – because it is generally considered a Haitian endemic whose range doesn’t cross the border into the Dominican Republic. When the sun set and I switched over to night hunting, I was happy to find out my intuition was, for once in my life, a close approximation of reality.
In the summer of 2010, one of the Glor Lab field teams gathered video of Anolis distichus displays as part of a project to quantify display diversity across the Dominican Republic. A video of a fight from this expedition was posted on Anole Annals and some great color changes from the same trip were posted on the Glor Lab’s blog a few months back. Another exciting action that was caught on video a few times throughout the trip was a little bit of the hanky panky. Generally, the male performed a set of pushups after which he chased and contacted the female. The two then performed some pushups together, followed by a few minutes of copulation in a leg-wrap. Copulation was followed by more pushups from the male. The video above shows an example of this typical sequence of events. Viewer discretion is advised.
Somewhere in this photo is a sleeping anole. The species is one that has only been reported from the Dominican Republic a few times.
If you can find the sleeping anole in those photo, you will have contributed to cataloging the anole fauna of the Dominican Republic. Points if you can identify the species. Hint – the photo was taken on the northern slopes of the Sierra de Bahorucco approx. 12km east of the Haitian border.
Early morning sighting of a female Anolis leachii on a leaf covered in raindrops.
Sometimes, they say, it’s about the journey, not the destination. This makes me think of exciting layovers I’ve had in Anolis country. At any place where the layover is long enough to permit stepping outside of the airport, I like to pop out and see what kind of anoles I can find lurking around the terminals. On a few occasions, travel requires an overnight stay in an exciting place. One of the benefits of working in remote Lesser Antillean islands is that infrequent (and unpredictable) airline schedules typically mean spending a night or two in tiny islands to and from the actual destination. For years I’ve been working in Montserrat, a small island with an active volcano, where I try to follow the flighty bugger Anolis lividus as close to the volcano as I can get. On our way home from Montserrat, we usually spend a night in Antigua, where the charming giant, Anolis leachii can be found.
View of a raincloud and rainbow as we descended into Antigua in January 2009.
Like most anoles from the Lesser Antilles, this species is abundant. However, few species from the Lesser Antilles are as large as A. leachii. It is a member of the bimaculatus clade of large anoles from the Northern Lesser Antilles. According to Scwhartz and Henderson (1991), it can reach a snout-vent length of 123 mm. For anyone who works with crown-giants, this may not seem so large, but for an aficionado of the Lesser Antillean anoles, Anolis leachii is a relative behemoth! Its body ranges from yellow to blue and green, and it’s covered in a purplish vermiculation. The large eyering ranges from a sulfurous yellow to a deep orange. Hands down, this is one of the world’s most beautiful anoles. Imagine my excitement when I got to spend a night chasing these lizards through the wilds of Antigua Village, a cushy beach resort teeming with Anolis leachii and the smaller congener, A. wattsii. Here I offer some photos of this dazzling species, and a bit of its taxonomic history.
Anolis carolinensis hatchling in our animal facility.
I’ve noticed that many of the anoles in my breeding colony occasionally have white protuberances emerging from their nostrils, like the two-month old hatchling to the left. I haven’t been able to determine whether these protuberances are the remnants of an old shed or whether the lizards have a fungus growing in their nostrils. By the time I catch an afflicted individual in its cage the protuberances are gone, seemingly because the lizard blew them out while moving to evade my hand. Has anyone experienced this phenomenon?
The pages of Anole Annals were recently graced with beautiful photos of Anolis embryos (here), their allure attracting attention from far and wide (here). Unfortunately, development doesn’t always go according to plan. While slight perturbations to development can create fodder for natural selection, more extreme phenotypic mutations can create not-so-hopeful monsters (a play on R. Goldschmidt’s theory of hopeful monsters which predicts that relatively large homeotic mutations can contribute to evolutionary saltations). Several years ago I dissected this embryo of A. sagrei. Count the body parts.What do you see?
This is likely one of the most extreme mutant Anolis embryos I have collected. I regularly
find dead embryos that appear normal morphologically and died for unknown causes. But this is the other extreme. This embryo clearly possesses a well-developed, seemingly normal head, limbs, and tail. It is even beginning to develop scales on the limbs and body. Without dissection I cannot be precisely sure about the nature of this mutation, but one can readily discern that there is no well-defined body axis, the head, tail, limbs all emerge from a nondescript central mass of tissue. Perhaps 
more interesting in this light, there also appears to be an axis duplication. Eight limbs, two tails, and two sets of hemipenes are visible, but only one head (note, only one eye is visible but both are present). Can’t see everything? Check out the labeled photos below.
Fights among anoles are fairly common in nature, and we’ve had several previous posts documenting anole fights captured on film (1, 2, 3, 4). A casual browsing of YouTube reveals many more anole fights, mostly between male Anolis carolinensis (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Many of these videos use the Rocky theme music to set the tone. I was really enjoying watching these videos until I got to thinking that some of them might actually be staged. I browsed the comments to see if I could figure out if the fights were staged, but didn’t come up with any definitive proof (in a few cases, I added my own comment asking directly if the fights were staged). However, there are certainly people who have commented that watching these videos has inspired them to raise fighting anoles. What do you think? Do some of these fights look staged to you?