Anole Annals

News-Journal/Mark Lane

The Daytona Beach News-Journal recently reported on a couple that has built an anole playground. Here’s the article:

The sign says “Lizard Land.” It’s a little sign. A lizard-sized sign, in fact. A sign marking a kind of lizard playground that Carol and Gary Mueller created in front of their home in Ormond by the Sea.

Anoles, small lizards that live around trees and eat insects, are a common sight in Florida yards. If you have enough time to sit very still outside, you’ve noticed their furtive movements up trees, down the side of the house and around the mailbox stand.

The Muellers have the time. “We’re totally retired,” laughs Gary, 70, a retired electrician. “Our biggest decision each day is whether to go to the ocean and fish or go to the river on the boat.”

One day they were sitting on the porch and noticed a particularly determined anole trying to make it to the top of a lawn ornament with a shiny globe on top.

“We were out there one time watching this little guy and he was trying like a dozen times to get up there,” recalled Gary. “So I thought, ‘I’ll make him a little bridge to get up there.’ ”

The little PVC ramp led to a more elaborate little lighthouse Gary made out of scrap wood laying around the garage. And that led to the miniature boathouse along with toy boats the couple found on the beach. And that led to the slide and the slide led to the little castle. It all turned into quite a little spread.

“The boathouse is their favorite part,” Carol. “It’s something to watch. They’re very smart little creatures.”

She said they now have a lizard population of about 15, “eight babies and seven big ones.”

It’s easy to tell them apart. “They’re very territorial, so each one sticks to its own part of the playground,” she said. Sometimes birds eat them but the local cats have mostly left them alone.

The current group of lizards are brown anoles, Anolis sagrei, a non-native lizard first noticed in the Florida Keys in 1887, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, but not recorded in Volusia County until the 1980s.

The couple said they sometimes get green anoles, too, Anolis carolinensis, which are native to Florida. Their numbers are down because of competition from the brown anoles, but they’re holding on. And occasionally, the Muellers spot a third kind. “They look like little dinosaurs, I don’t know what they’re called,” Carol said.

Carol used to be a tram driver at Fort Wilderness at Disney World. “Casting felt I looked rugged,” she said. She liked the job and the people and being outdoors. She met her husband in the 1980s on New Year’s Eve. Both moved here from Orlando. They’ve been at their current home for two years.

“I don’t go there to Orlando anymore,” Gary said. “You need a helicopter to get there anymore.”

“Everything we need is in Ormond Beach,” agreed Carol.

Including the pleasures of sitting on the porch in the evening just watching lizards scamper around the garden.

Caption from article: A brown anole checks out a PVC ramp at Lizard Land in the yard of Ormond-by-the-Sea residents Carol and Gary Mueller. News-Journal/Mark Lane

Caption from article: Lizard tower is seen with an anole holding onto its side in the Lizard Land area of the yard of Ormond-by-the-Sea residents Carol and Gary Mueller. Photo courtesy Carol Mueller

xxx

Nyctanolis pernix. Photo by Robin Moore

The Amphibian Survival Alliance reports: “Two rare salamander species lost to science for nearly 40 years have not only been recently rediscovered, but a consortium of international groups has protected some of the last remaining forest home of the salamanders just in the nick of time.”

One of these salamanders is Nyctanolis pernix, a long-limbed, arboreal salamander. Paul Elias and Dave Wake described the species in 1983 in the festschrift for Ernest Williams, Advances in Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology (in fact, it was the first article in the volume). The authors explained the species name as follows: “We name the new genus for its anoline apsect and nocturnal habitats (Gr., nyktos, night) and the species (L., quick agile) for its gymnastic behavior.

Read all about it on the ASA webpage.

A movie production company in Germany is named Anolis Entertainment. We’ve mentioned them previously in these pages. What I believe is their latest project, The Reptile, is described by as “Horror at its finest,” winning the coveted “bloody disgusting” rating. Oops. My mistake. The blog is called Bloody Disgusting, but the review substantiates the name. For Anolis Entertainment’s other films, go to their website which, oddly, features an iguana at the top. Be forewarned: the site is in German. I suspect there’s an English version out there, but I can’t find it.

For the last several months, I’ve been collecting eggs from 36 female Anolis sagrei from Gainesville, FL. This is for a project on linking the movement patterns and mating patterns of brown anoles. To be able to assess which males have mated with each of these females, I’ll be sequencing the DNA from the mothers, their offspring, and potential fathers, and then trying to figure out which males have fathered each female’s offspring. All this is to say that what I want from the eggs I’ve been collecting is the offspring’s DNA. To this end, I’ve been dissecting out embryos from eggs about ten days after laying, and storing the tissue for future genetic work.

So far, the females have laid over 300 eggs, and dissecting embryos out of them has gotten a little monotonous. So I didn’t pay any special attention to an egg that looked perhaps a bit bigger than normal. I was shocked, though, when two seemingly healthy embryos popped out of it!

Two embryos from a single brown anole egg

My initial excitement waned when I realised that twins are not that rare in humans, but returned when two anole breeding experts (AA correspondents Thom Sanger and Anthony Geneva) said that they haven’t seen anything quite like this before. In Thom’s words, “I’ve only found two [twins] in over a decade of dissecting eggs, both were conjoined and inviable. I think you have something special.”

Have any of you seen anything like this before?

While canoodling about on the internet, I came across this delightful drawing of a green guana (Anolis garmani), which in turn led me to its source, Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica, published in 1851. Here’s the charming description of the species, including evidence that the art of lizard noosing has a long history. The description starts here:

It then continues:

and concludes:

And here’s the title page:

A green anole on the Ogasawara Islands. Photot from Alamy

Anolis carolinensis is an invasive pest in the Ogasawara Islands near Japan, and the Japanese are trying hard to get rid of it. Do you think green anoles can be lured by bait–in this case a cricket–so they’ll approach and stuck in a sticky trap? Apparently they will, as Mitani et al. report in the latest edition of Current Herpetology. Here’s the abstract:

A non-native insectivorous lizard, the green anole (Anolis carolinensis), is causing a severe negative impact on the insect fauna of the Ogasawara Islands of Japan, a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site. A common method to capture anoles is to use adhesive traps. We tested if attracting the lizard by bait improves the effectiveness of these traps. We examined the effects of a lizard’s (1) length of fasting period, (2) distance to the bait, and (3) access to the bait on feeding attempts in a laboratory experiment using 15 lizards collected from Chichi-jima Island. Responses to the baits were also observed in the field, and stomach contents of the trapped lizards were analyzed to assess fasting level in a natural population. The number of lizards that reached the bait was positively correlated with increased fasting days. With a smaller number of days of fasting, the number of lizards that reached the bait was significantly higher when the bait was 50 cm away than 195 cm. Based on the stomach contents of wild A. carolinensis on Chichi-jima, the fasting period of invasive A. carolinensis was typically short, with 92% of the lizards foraging at least every other day. Both laboratory and field experiments indicate the bait must be less than ca. 2 m away to effectively attract the lizard. There is no clear difference between a lizard’s attraction to crickets tethered to a line and those housed in a transparent cup. Therefore, whether the lizard could physically capture the prey did not alter the effectiveness of the bait. This suggests that using an artificial bait simulating prey movement may also be effective.

We’ve had previous posts on anoles at hummingbird feeders, but here’s a video tweeted by Beidler Forest (note: that is a photo of the tweet above; you can’t click on the arrow; you have to click on the link).

Haitian artist Eric Jean Louis has painted this lovely scene, entitled “Les Deux Anolis.” It’s on sale for $750.

A crested anole eating a caterpillar. Not the subject of this blog post described below. Photo by Pedro Lastra.

The Green Ogre provides a first-hand account of an anole with a surprisingly tough battle to capture a caterpillar. In the end, the anole triumps, but should it have been so difficult?