While out studying everyone’s favorite evolutionary radiation in the Bahamas, one can’t help but come across exemplars of another important evolutionary group, pictured above. Can anyone tell us what that group is, and what its place is in the history of evolutionary biology?
Category: Notes from the Field Page 19 of 22
Staniel Cay is one of the quaint Caribbean backwaters, populated by yachtsmen, expats, scalawags, locals and…scientists. For more than 30 years, Tom Schoener, David Spiller and associates have worked here, producing a series of textbook studies on food web ecology (most recently here).
Having finished our work in Marsh Harbour, we have relocated to Staniel, marking a return for me after a 19 year absence. As our plane wended its way down the Exuma
- Headin’ south down the Exumas.
chain, the memories of my previous visits and their results came flooding back. While a graduate student in the 80’s, I read Schoener and Schoener’s 1983 Nature paper reporting the results of introductions of brown anoles (A. sagrei) to very small islands (approx. the size of a baseball diamond) around Staniel Cay. S&S, noting that islands of this size do not normally harbor anoles, decided to introduce lizards to watch the populations wither away, and thus learn something about the process of extinction. But to their surprise, the populations did not go quietly into the night. Instead, they thrived and some downright exploded in numbers, one island going from 10 introduced lizards to 98 the next year.
I will admit here that I used to be a little jealous of other anole catchers. This twinge of want was not necessarily due to any perceived greater intellectual merit of the research, nor to collecting successes in terms of sheer numbers of lizards. My envy stemmed from the fact that the stories were exotic, involving international travel to islands in the Caribbean both great and small, where supposedly the anoles practically fall out of the trees and astonish you with their diversity and abundance.
Green anole in Arkansas
I would think to myself how comparatively boring my field work must sound: driving in a blue van with New York plates, weaving across state lines, searching for A. carolinensis, the lone species that lives on the continent — the Drosophila melanogaster of an otherwise thrillingly diverse genus. Can there be a more boring species than a lizard with the word “green” in its common name? Even the folks I meet while traveling in the field hint at mundaneness when I tell them what I am looking for: “Where you really need to look is on my aunt’s patio!” Yes sir, I know they often pop up in the begonias, but will they be there when I need them to be (because they never are)? Plus, I have to be in southern Georgia by tomorrow afternoon so I need anoles from this latitude today!
Captain Leal and First Mate Kolbe. Photo by Gilligan.
Over at Chipojolab, Manuel Leal has a video and a photograph from last week’s field work on Abaco, Bahamas. The video is of yours truly, failing to noose a wily brown anole, Anolis sagrei. More interesting is the photo of Leal next to an odd looking piece of equipment. What is that gizmo? Here’s a close-up:
By slowing turning the knob at the lower right, the tweezers are pulled downward, allowing the dewlap to be pulled out to maximal extension.
This Rube Goldberg contraption is used to pull out a male’s dewlap to take color readings with a spectrophotometer.
Sitting on an airplane from Boston to Miami, en route to Marsh Harbour, I realized that this trip marks the 20th anniversary of my Bahamian fieldwork. It was as a callow new postdoc at the University of California, Davis, that I first embarked to the Bahamas in May, 1991, setting forward a research program that has brought me back every year in the past two decades, some times more than once per year. I’ve lost track of how much time in total I’ve spent there, but it’s been more than a year of my life (of course, I should point out that my colleagues in crime have been going there even longer, Dave Spiller since the 80’s and Tom Schoener, since the 70’s).
What keeps bringing us back? Despite what you might think, it’s not the beaches, or even the casinos! The primary reason is that in many areas of the Bahamas, there are a large number of very small islands. They are officially termed “rocks,” and aptly so: they are craggy dots of limestone sharpness, ranging in size from a few square meters 
on up. There are several things that are great about these islets. First, they have complex ecosystems, but not too complex: a few species of bushes and trees, a variety of insects and other arthropods, and often only one species of lizard, the brown anole, Anolis sagrei. As the islands get bigger, they become lusher and more species rich in everything, including lizards. Second, many of the islands are just the right size: big enough to have lizards (the smallest islands generally don’t), small enough that we can easily census the populations of lizards, spiders, plants, and other creatures.
One of the perks of working on anoles is doing fieldwork in exotic and interesting places. For me, being located as I am in steamy New Orleans, an additional perk is that I can (and do!) do fieldwork in my metaphorical back yard. As of last year, I have begun what I hope will become a long-term study of a local population of Anolis carolinensis in Washington Square Park in the Faubourg Marigny, right on the edge of the French Quarter. (As an aside to fellow anole biologists, if anyone is planning future anole collecting trips to NOLA my lab and I would be more than happy to help out, with the caveat that the anoles in Washington Square Park remain uncollected and unmolested, given that selection is one of the many things we are currently measuring). But doing fieldwork in populated urban areas also presents its own unique set of challenges, not the least of which is the colorful local populace. This generally breaks down into several categories. In most cases, people are simply curious as to why someone would spend a warm, spring day diving into bushes for no apparent reason, and immediately assume that you are a lunatic once you explain to them that it is with the aim of documenting the Lizard Invasion (“They’re all around us!”). Others are genuinely fascinated with the anoles, and will listen with interest to what we are doing and why before leaving us to go about our business. Then there is another small segment of the population who hold strong and invariably uninformed opinions on science, lizards, nature and animal rights which they eagerly thrust upon hapless anole investigators with no warning or provocation. Dealing with these people can be difficult, as it requires certain baseline levels of patience and diplomacy that I sometimes do not possess. Finally, New Orleans being New Orleans also plays host to a surprisingly large amount of people who are not burdened with an abundance of sobriety at 9am on a Tuesday (or, perhaps, ever). Interactions with these special people run the gamut from mildly amusing (the Grateful Dead fan last week who casually mentioned that he was on day 3 of “tripping [his] balls off” and helpfully warned me to “watch out for roofies”) to tiresome (the heroically inebriated gentleman who followed me around the park recently for 10 minutes whilst repeatedly slurring the same unintelligible question in my general direction) and even vaguely unnerving (the cracked-out, half-naked couple chasing a rubbish truck down Frenchmen street and yelling at it).
Pictured: Outreach
It was this inconvenient presence of the public in public places that in 2004 led Duncan Irschick, weary of interacting with other human beings, to make perhaps his most important contribution to anole biology – the “I’m catching lizards” t-shirt. Originally made for Irschick lab members during sampling of the Tulane University A. carolinensis population, these three simple words, printed in stark white on the back of a dark green shirt, were intended to inform the casual passersby as to the nature of our unusual outdoor activities, thereby dissuading them from engaging any of us in conversation. It works extremely well, except on those occasions when it backfires, instead acting as crazy bait and attracting exactly the type of person you don’t want to speak to whilst conducting fieldwork. Still, the benefits outweigh the occasional costs, and my shirt has seen regular use over the years. I don’t particularly recommend wearing it in non-lizard catching contexts, however, as herpetologists are generally considered to be weird enough as it is.
Stumbling over the search terms leading to the Anole Annals blog today I found this interesting bit of information:
…”afraid of anolis”?
Scoliodentosaurophobia, apparently, is the scientific expression for “fear of lizards”. It’s a category to the more general Herpetophobia (fear of amphibians and/or reptiles). These sorts of fears might seem a little bit odd to the herpetologist… after all I have heard of colleagues having bite lists for fun (“what was the coolest species that ever had its fangs in you?”). But they are surprisingly present amongst laymen and –women out there. Women in Africa would run screaming when they’d see me handling chameleons – fearing that the chameleon’s stare would prevent them from having babies. In the DR, Miguel Landestoy and I were convinced we could help prevent the slaughtering of Haitiophis snakes out of fear by telling farmers that “the girl (me) is not afraid of them either”, appealing to their machismo. The large Dominican green anole Anolis baleatus (and probably some other large crown giants too) has the nickname Salta cocote because it is supposed to jump at people from the trees, trying to suck their blood (“dice la leyenda que le salta a la gente y le muerde el cocote”). An older gentleman seemed very convinced that the Salta cocote had just sucked to death some of his neighbor’s cattle. It even has its own Merengue song (Caco e maco salta cocote, which literally means “you ugly frog head, lizard”).
Phobophobes, by the way, are afraid of phobias.
from Michele Johnson:
Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join one of my colleagues, mammalogist David Ribble, in the data collection for a vertebrate biodiversity survey he’s working on at Bamberger Ranch in Johnson City, Texas. (Incidentally, David is a grad school pal of Jonathan Losos – it’s always a small world.) We trapped rodents, checked pitfall traps, lifted cover boards, and jumped out of the truck when we saw snakes in the road. This was my first experience trapping mammals, and I was impressed by the many similarities, and the important differences, between field studies of rodents and anoles.
This is not an anole. It’s a Peromyscus pectoralis from Bamberger Ranch, with a fresh ear tag.
The similarities:
1. When you grab an animal, it pees on you.
2. If you don’t hold on tight, the animal gets away. (The perils of working with students…)
3. If you don’t hold on right, you get bitten.
4. When you catch males, you confirm the sex by everting the penes.
5. Tails can come off – oops!
6. We all pose our specimens in unnatural positions. (Mice get a “Superman flying” pose; anoles a “mid-jumping jack” pose.)
7. Field work is better with beer.
The differences:
1. You can lure mice into little traps using food. It would be awfully convenient if anoles fell for such a trick.
2. If an anole bites your finger, you can blow on its face until it lets go. If a mouse bites your finger, you bleed all over everything.
3. Male mice only have one penis, poor guys.
4. If takes way more work to make a mouse specimen than an anole specimen – you have to skin it, stuff it, and pin it. I prefer fixation with nasty chemicals.
Assuming my lists are exhaustive, it’s clear that the study of anoles has more similarities than differences with the study of their amniotic brethren. Still, I think I’ll stick with anoles.
PS – For those of you wondering, the rodents we trapped were Sigmodon hispidus (cotton rat) and Peromyscus pectoralis (white-ankled mouse), and the herps we caught were Sceloporus undulatus, Acris crepitans blanchardi, and Thamnophis proximus. It was very cold that weekend.
A female and male Anolis gemmosus, photo by Luke Mahler
Last summer in Mindo, Ecuador, we found several pairs of Anolis gemmosus sleeping in very close proximity to each other, but not overlapping like Kat observed with Anolis etheridgei (earlier post). The pairs were always facing the same direction and the pairs were made up of any combination of males and females. To be fair, we also saw many sleeping alone, and the area was densely populated with A. gemmosus. Unfortunately, our dedicated pursuit of Anolis proboscis kept us from making detailed observations. Random coincidence or something more?
Is this really worth it? I was asking myself while trying to balance my weight on the slanted old tree which I had climbed, the mountain stream beneath me gurgling around glistening rocks in the humid night. I stretched out my left arm as far as possible while clinging onto the tree with my right, to snap a probably completely out-of-focus and missing-the-object-of-focus picture with my trusty waterproof Pentax. While pushing the releaser button, I noticed some parts of the old tree I was holding on to slowly giving away. A flash, a thump, and I found myself suddenly clinging to another part of the tree, while the green power diode of my camera now flickered at me from the bottom of the stream. Great, I thought, you’ve ruined your camera for a picture that won’t even have anything on it and wasn’t that great to begin with either. This is why I want to make it worth it now, a posteriori: worth a blog post. Examining the SD card later on it turned out, that there was indeed a motif on that picture, and even the one I had hoped to catch: Two male Anolis etheridgei sleeping together on a leaf (more like waking up on a leaf due to my intrusion), facing away from each other. What made this observation picture-worthy for me is that these weren’t the only specimens I found like that that night. At least five other pairs of male A. etheridgei were sleeping in the same position, touching each other’s tails. When I approached them, the one that would wake up first would make a jerking movement, then both would simultaneously drop from their sleeping site into the leaf litter. They were way harder to catch than many other sleeping anoles I’ve stalked at night. Four eyes are better than two, as the saying goes, and those little anoles seemed to have realized just that.
Cuddling for safety
Rest in peace, my trusty Pentax Optio WP.