This female Anolis carolinensis has a tail that is kinked in a zig-zag fashion, starting from what seems to be the proximal autotomization point and continuing distally along the tail. The kinks are permanent. Running the tail between one’s fingers fails to smooth out the zig-zags. Have any anoleologists out there seen this growth pattern before? Any idea what might cause it? Additional photos and an x-ray are after the jump.
Category: Natural History Observations Page 29 of 34
Looking through old image files I found the above picture. At first glance, this may look like an unearthed fossil. No way. Try to earn some points by answering the questions below:
- Which species is this?
- What happened to it (cause of death)?
- Where (within the DR) or in which type of habitat did this take place (this is linked to #1 and #2)?
- What is the dark patch in the background/horizon, located in the upper right of picture (linked to #2 and #3).
Fights between male anoles in nature can get pretty serious. A few dramatic anole fight videos have already been posted on-line, including some mentioned previously on anole annals ([1], [2]). Recently, I posted photos from a fight we saw this summer on a rock along the Rio Bani between two males of A. d. ravitergum. This was the most dramatic anole fight I’ve ever seen, with the males tumbling head over heels down a boulder while locked in combat. The fight ended with one male skulking off and the other proudly displaying from atop the boulder. Now, Shea Lambert has posted his video of the fight on YouTube (Shea aptly added background music from the classic video game Mortal Kombat). This video was taken with a point and shoot digital camera, so the quality isn’t the greatest, but Shea did a great job capturing all of the acrobatics! To quote Shea immediately after the fight: “That dark anole is a straight-up ninja.”
Acrobatic bushmaster says hello!
At the Nashville Zoo we have a large mixed species exhibit that contains two species of dart frog, a bushmaster, Gonatodes, and 2.3 Roquet’s anoles (Savannah anoles). We are working on some new graphics where we hope to incorporate videos, and in that attempt we captured some great footage of our two male A. roquet displaying towards one another. The two males are approximately a foot apart and right in front of the glass of the exhibit. The females were watching anxiously as shortly after the video stops one male chases the other up a tree. I hope you enjoy the clips.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/66876684@N04/6086156957/in/photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/66876684@N04/6086649388/in/photostream/
a juvenile Anolis orcesi, in the afternoon of an all-day recording
They wake up, but hit the snooze button before they really get moving. They poop, grab something to eat, and then check out the neighborhood. They take wrong turns, and have to turn around when they reach a dead end. Young boys try to impress each other with their dewlaps. They take naps in the afternoon, and yawn throughout the day. They even sleep in the same bed, most nights.
As Jonathan Losos hinted at in an earlier post, we observed 4 Anolis orcesi individuals from dawn to dusk (12 hours!), and several more individuals for 1 to 6 hours, in the vicinity of Baeza, Ecuador. More to come after several months of video analysis!
I am irreparably fond of anoles, but I must admit that they are not the cuddliest of beasts. In fact, they can be downright unfriendly, especially with each other. The mere sight of another male sends anoles into spasms and, when not mating, males and females seem to barely tolerate each other, at best. It would seem that cuddling is best left to mammals and birds, but recent observations would indicate that even the ornery anole has a soft side.
Anolis shrevei mating pair cuddling in Valle Nuevo, Dominican Republic.
A post by Kat Wollenberg on this blog documented two Anolis etheridgei sleeping with their tails intertwined. A follow-up post by Melissa Woolley shows that Anolis gemmosus mating pairs sleep near each other, even if not touching.
But does an anole have to be asleep to show its softer side? In June 2011 I observed an Anolis shrevei mating pair in Valle Nuevo cuddle as they basked one afternoon. It is chilly at 2500 meters, even in the Dominican Republic. It had been a cold morning, and neither the sun nor the lizards had shown themselves until almost noon. But when the sun did peek out from behind the clouds, there was a mass exodus of anoles, which came out from under their rocks to take advantage of the day’s first rays. This little pair came out from under the same rock and sat together for close to an hour. They were touching each other, despite the fact that there seemed to be enough rock to go around. Whether this was coincidence or another mechanism of behavioral thermoregulation, the anoles of the chilly Cordillera Central know how to keep warm.
Phenacosaurus orcesi. Photo by Melissa Woolley.
As I prepared for our current trip to Ecuador to study the natural history of Phenacosaurus orcesi, I feared that we would not find any lizards. After all, until recently, the species was known from only two specimens. What if we simply couldn’t find them?
These fears were assuaged when I reviewed the literature—scant as it is—on phenacosaur ecology. In the most comprehensive study, Miyata found 77 P. heterodermus individuals in blackberry bushes in five afternoons of observations at a site near Bogota. On seeing the previous AA post, Vic Hutchison also recalled finding P. heterodermus in blackberry bushes in Colombia. George Gorman mentioned to me that he collected phenacs in a suburb of Bogota in the summer on 1968, and he recalls that “it was a like Lesser Antillean experience…rather than a ‘mainland’ experience, in that the lizards were abundant, easily collected, and on fenceposts and hedges.” In addition, the original description of P. vanzolinii states that “the local people say that the ‘camaleon o camaleon’ is common in the fields of maize.”
From all of this information, I formed the hypothesis that finding phenacs would be easy, that we’d be awash with data and would finish so early that we could go traipsing off elsewhere in Ecuador. In other words, I set myself up for the Principle of Unsympathetic Magic to rear its ugly head, and it did so with a vengeance.
Image of Anolis darlingtoni from http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/evolution/A-Long-Lost-Lizard-is-Found-in-Haiti.html
Last week, Blair Hedges led a team of scientists, journalists and naturalists on a helicopter tour of some of the most remote forested habitats remaining on Haiti’s Tiburon Peninsula. For anole enthusiasts, this expedition’s most remarkable find was the rediscovery of Anolis darlingtoni, an enigmatic species that hasn’t been seen since 1984. As reported by Faye Flam at Philly.com, expedition member Miguel Landestoy spotted a single animal sleeping around 2m up in a tree fern. This seems to have been the only darlingtoni recovered by the expedition, but full trip details are still filtering in.
Even with this rediscovery, Anolis darlingtoni remains the rarest anole on Hispaniola, and the one that is the most immediate danger of extinction. Luke Mahler and I went to a great deal of trouble to search for A. darlingtoni in remnant forests at the western end of the Tiburon Peninsula a few years ago and came up empty, so I know that finding this species is no easy feat. My congratulations to Blair, Miguel, and the rest of the team!
Brown phase green anole. Photo by Janson Jones at Dust Tracks on the Web (http://dusttracks.com/)
At Dust Tracks on the Web, Janson Jones posts some interesting observations on green anoles (A. carolinensis) in northern Florida and southern Georgia, where the brown anole (A. sagrei) has yet to invade. To cut to the chase, he finds the green anoles to be larger, to be brown more often, and to perch much lower than green anoles do in central Florida in the presence of brown anoles.
The effect of brown anoles on greens in Florida has been surprisingly poorly documented. Just as surprisingly, very little information exists in the scientific literature on the habitat use, behavior, and other aspects of green anole natural history in places where they occur by themselves. We have almost no useful data on what green anole biology was like in Florida pre-sagrei, nor few data from areas where sagrei does not occur today. Detailed and quantitative studies of such populations would be particularly useful, as well as repeated surveys through time in areas that brown anoles may eventually invade to document what happens when they get there (of course, repeated surveys in areas that brown anoles don’t invade would be important to, as controls). Those of you who live in appropriate areas, get to it!
Who knows what Phenacosaurus dreams about?
On her very first day of anole fieldwork, soon-to-be graduate student Katie B. experienced a clear example of the wisdom of Ernest Williams. Out at night looking for anoles with her soon-to-be advisor, they came across the first Phenacosaurus orcesi of the trip, clinging to a narrow, vertical twig about eight feet above the ground. This led to a long pontification by the advisor on how some anoles sleep on leaves, others on branches, and so on, but how P. orcesi, in so many respects similar to twig anoles, would surely only be found sleeping on the twigs to which it is so well adapted, and would abjure all vegetated slumber sites. Needless to say, the next phenacosaur found that evening was snoozing sprawled across a leaf (as well as the next one found the following evening), teaching Katie both about the Principle of Unsympathetic Magic and the general lack of veracity of anything her advisor-to-be says.
p.s. Katie won the candy bar for correctly predicting the number of lizards captured on the first evening.