Anolis sagrei with a regrown tail. Photo by Philip Fortman
Kristin Winchell has the answer. Check it out on her blog, Adaptability. Here’s a shot of the poster she discusses:
Here is a video taken by University of Miami PhD student Joanna Weremijewicz at the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens in Miami, FL last Friday (20th March 2015). There have been lots of posts talking about the predation potential of egrets (and other wading birds) on anoles here on AA similar to this (1,2,3,4), but I think this could be the first one recording predation of A. cristatellus? Cool video!
After looking through my photos from my trip last week to Bimini in the Bahamas, I was disappointed when I realized that none of us seemed to have any pictures of Anolis distichus. Or maybe we did? Among all the typical sagrei-looking anole photos was this guy:
Anolis distichus or Anolis sagrei???
Without telling you why I thought this was a distichus, or why others I have asked are torn between distichus and sagrei, I am curious what people think. What species is this?
Compared with our extensive knowledge of male-male interactions, we know very little about how females interact with one another. Adding to a growing set of observations, here is some video (taken by my field assistant and seasoned anole videographer Jon Suh) of two bead-tagged female brown anoles mid-battle.
Both females are recent arrivals to this particular tree, and the lizard that remains on the tree at the end is marginally bigger than the one who leaves. Though I don’t think we witnessed the full interaction, I think it’s interesting that the females didn’t use their dewlaps in the course of this fight. This seems to match up with Ellee Cook’s description of a fight between two female A. gundlachi. The use of the dewlap by females has been observed during male-female interactions in A. cristatellus, A. armouri and a few other species, but also during female-female interactions in some Central American anoles. Clearly we’ve got a long way to go before we characterize and understand agonistic encounters and display behaviour in female anoles!
Anolis sagrei on the beautiful island of Bimini
I just got back from a 10 day research trip to Bimini in the western Bahamas along with Harvard post-doc, Graham Reynolds, Harvard graduate student, Pavitra Muralidhar, and UMass Boston undergraduate, Jason Fredette. We went with the simple goals of kicking off a research project in the Losos lab on Anolis sagrei and to observe as many other herps as we could.
We spent the majority of our time on South Bimini. We sampled from the well-maintained Nature Trail, where we found all four anole species (Anolis sagrei, Anolis smaragdinus, Anolis angusticeps, and Anolis distichus) and a Bimini boa among diverse habitat types, including blackland coppice and open Coccothrinax shrub. We also spent a couple of nights searching in some mangrove forest near the airport, which yielded only A. sagrei and A. angusticeps and in low abundance at that. The “Fountain of Youth” ended up being a gold mine for Sphaerodactylus nigropunctatus as well as boas — we caught 3 here.
Male Anolis sagrei
Anolis smaragdinus
Anolis angusticeps
We also did a fair amount of exploring. Our hosts for our house rental wanted to make sure we had a great time in Bimini and so they insisted on boating us out to a couple of the nearby islands for some snorkeling. They even provided us with the best full face snorkel mask I’ve ever laid my eyes on. We picked up a boat for the ride at the Intrepid Powerboats website. Of course, we saw this as the perfect opportunity to catch a few lizards. Our first destination was Gun Cay, a small island a few miles to the south of Bimini. Pavitra and Jason entertained our hosts by collecting shells and feeding stingrays. Meanwhile, despite our hosts’ curiosity that we wanted to go wander in the brush, Graham and I nabbed 10 adult male A. sagrei in less than an hour. We also saw several Ameiva auberi, Anolis smaragdinus, and some sort of very large rodent (does anyone know about Hutia reintroductions in the Bahamas?).
The following day, our hosts insisted we come with them to a small island 20+ miles to the north of Bimini (Great Isaac Cay) where they promised us dolphins and hammerhead sharks. On the way to the island we saw several dolphins, tons of flying fish, sea turtles, and several large nurse sharks. As we approached the island, I saw the mature Casuarina forest and yelled down to Graham from the crow’s nest tower, “I want to go explore there!” Our hosts got us as close as they could to the rocky shore (dangerously close it seemed, the hull almost hit the rocky karst island) and all four of us hopped onto the island. The island had an abandoned lighthouse and buildings from the 1800’s that we explored. We were shocked to not find a single anole on Isaac Island, although we did find Sphaerodactylus nigropunctatus and Ameiva auberi.
The isolated Great Isaac Cay with ruins from the late 1800’s.
The trip was a huge success. In total, we came across all but five of the reptiles of Bimini. Surprisingly, we were unable to find any Bahamian racers (Alsophis vudii) other than roadkills, though most of our field time was at night. Unsurprisingly, we did not find either of the blind snakes or the dwarf boa, the latter of which tends to be more common in the rainy season. As expected, A. sagrei was the most abundant anole on Bimini. We came across A. angusticeps and A. smaragdinus with equal frequency and actually encountered only a few A. distichus. We did most of our searching at night, so this may be a reflection on different sleeping behaviors rather than abundance.
In summary, we were able to observe:
- 140+ Anolis sagrei males and females
- 9 Sphaerodactylus nigropunctatus (black-dotted dwarf gecko)
- 1 Sphaerodactylus argus (ocellated dwarf gecko)
- Dozens of Leiocephalus carinatus (curly-tail lizard)
- 5 Chilabothrus strigilatus fosteri (Bimini boa)
- a handful of Anolis distichus, Anolis smaragdinus, Anolis angusticeps
We also saw a number of other herps that we were not able to catch or didn’t need data from:
- Ameiva auberi (Bimini ameiva)
- Eleutherodactylus planirostris (greenhouse frog)
- Osteopilus septentrionalis (Cuban tree frog)
- Hemidactylus mabouia (invasive house gecko)
Liam Revell writes:
My co-authors (Luke Mahler, Graham Reynolds, & Graham Slater) and I recently presented a ‘new’ method for placing recently extinct taxa into a backbone molecular phylogeny on the basis of quantitative trait data. I say ‘new’ with quotes, because our methods derives closely, with full credit given where due, from a Maximum Likelihood phylogeny inference approach presented originally by Felsenstein (1981, 2002).
The idea is basically as follows. We start with a time-calibrated molecular phylogeny containing N – 1 species, and a single taxon of interest (the Nth taxon) whose placement in the tree is of interest, but for which molecular characters are missing. If we have quantitative trait data from one or more characters for all N species in the tree, we can use an approach based on Felsenstein (1981) to add this taxon to our base phylogeny using the statistical criterion of Maximum Likelihood.
In our article (Revell et al. 2015), we demonstrate that the method works pretty well in theory. In fact, for more than a few quantitative characters & particularly for trees of large size, the method often places the missing taxon in our dataset in a topological position that is identical to its true position. (See figure below, reproduced from our article.) In the figure, white bars show the performance of our method (compared to grey bars which represent placement at random). In all cases, lower values indicate that the estimated tree is closer to the generating tree.
The question you’re probably asking yourself (and quite rightly so) is: what could this possibly have to do with anoles? The answer is that we applied the method to the unusual case of Anolis roosevelti. Anolis roosevelti, as many readers of this blog likely already know, is a mysterious crown-giant anole from Culebra and (probably) the Spanish, U.S., and British Virgin Islands, excluding St. Croix. It is only known from a few specimens and was last collected in 1932. Aside from some unconfirmed reports, it has neither been seen nor heard from since. Unfortunately – and tragically given the impressive nature of this creature – all but the most optimistic anole biologists agree that this species is most likely extinct. (Many of us, the author included, still holds out hope, of course.) The figure below shows the type specimen of this impressive creature. (Figure from our article and image courtesy of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.)
Since no prior investigator has collected molecular characters from this species, and the prospects for so doing in the future are somewhat mixed (for reasons that we explain in the article), we thought Anolis roosevelti would represent an interesting test case for our method. Would A. roosevelti, we asked ourselves, fall out as sister to the Puerto Rican crown-giant, Anolis cuvieri, as sister-to or nested-within the rest of Puerto Rican anoles, or in another part of the tree entirely?
Cabela’s telescopic panfish poles (in both 10′ and 12′ versions) are currently on sale, reduced from $27.99 to $17.49 per pole. These are currently regarded as the best product in the anole noosing game (1,2,3).
Telescopic panfish poles on sale here.
Get them while you can!
The last time I was on Anole Annals, I posted about the peculiar display of Anolis ortonii from the Tiputini Biodiversity Station in eastern Ecuador. Nearly two years later, I was lucky enough to return to the area for another month and bring back some more videos of Amazonian anoles. Unfortunately I never saw Anolis trachyderma or A.chrysolepis show off their dewlaps, but here are three other species.
First up is Anolis fuscoauratus. I didn’t encounter many individuals of this species compared to my first trip, perhaps the differences in seasonality are to blame. I luckily shot this footage only a few days before leaving.
Next is Anolis punctatus, which was surprisingly abundant. I’ll be posting more videos of A. punctatus later as I was lucky enough to observe many other behaviors, but here is the display of at least three different individuals. All of these lizards were found high up in the canopy except for the second to last clip.
Finally, while not as visibly abundant as its cousin, I was fortunate to come across Anolis transversalis. I was photographing some Plica plica on a large ficus, when this lizard descended and scampered across the buttress roots. Eventually it jumped onto an adjacent thin tree and displayed a few times before climbing higher into the canopy.
But this story ends on a sad note. Four days later I was around the same tree when an anole ran down the trunk with an insect in its mouth.
I assume it was the same individual from the other day given the same location, but I can’t be sure. This time he was displaying more vigorously before his arrogance got the best of him. While I was adjusting my camera to get closer a bird swooped in and when I looked up there was no lizard. I never saw A. transversalis on that tree again.
Rest In Peace
Bill Schlesinger, one of the world’s most eminent biogeochemists and President Emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies, turns out to have an eagle eye for anoles. While on a birding trip to Puerto Rico, his wife, writer Lisa Dellwo, snapped the photos below in the rainforest in the west central part of the island. Which species are they?
Piero Angeli Ruschi from the Ornithology Department in the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro sent the pictures of Anolis punctatus shown here. His story:
It’s raining lizards!
“These are the pictures that I took of one of the Anolis specimens that had fallen that day. They fell from the canopy straight to open ground over an area of ~70 squared meters. About 10 specimens fell within ~3 min. It happened in Santa Lucia Ecological Station, at Santa Teresa, ES, Brazil in late september 2007 during the afternoom while I monitored a woodpecker nest.
The individuals were all the same as the one in that picture…green with a yellow circle around the eye…Those pictures might even include more than one individual—I am not sure if the one photographed on the ground was the same I captured (they stayed knocked out for a minute or so before running from where they landed).
I wish I had more data to publish a communication about it, as well as more evidence to explain the cause of it. My ornithological background leads me to the alternative hypothesis of some sort of “arena,” but I have no idea if such thing can be expected for these lizards.”
Piero Angeli Ruschi in his day job observing birds