Parasitologist and herpetologist extraordinaire Susan Perkins is featured on the American Museum of Natural History’s website. Included are two podcasts in which she discusses fieldwork on the leopard anole, Anolis sabanus. Hear her discuss malaria, giant cockroaches, karaoke and the rigors of fieldwork on a tiny island.
Photo from Daffodil’s Photo Blog
This is the same lizard featured last week on Daffodil’s Blog eating a spider. Now it’s nomming something else, and photographer Karen Cusick doesn’t know what. Any thoughts?
I’m in southern Costa Rica doing field work with bats, but once an anole lover, always an anole lover so when I get a night off I like to go herping. Since everyone loves a sleeping anole (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, among others), I thought I’d share some photos that a friend and I took while wandering around at night. I’m not sure what the last one is; I’m guessing Anolis polylepis (we’re at 1100m at the Las Cruces Biological Station and it was sleeping about 1m above the ground).
Anolis capito. Photo by Jon Flanders
Anolis aquaticus. Photo by Jon Flanders
Anolis polylepis? Photo by Jon Flanders
En el marco de mi investigación sobre la Eco-fisiología térmica de Anolis huilae, me encontré (en mi finca) con un par de posturas, una con cuatro huevos y otra con 22 huevos. Este hallazgo me sorprendió, al encontrar diferentes tamaños en los huevos.
Postura de Anolis huilae, Juntas (Ibagué-Tolima-Colombia)
En mi curiosidad por determinar si efectivamente se trataba de huevos de la especie en mención, me di a la tarea de abrir uno para corroborar, encontrando un individuo en un estadío de su formación (el ejemplar fue donado al Laboratorio de Herpetología de la Universida del Tolima).
Embrión de Anolis huilae.
He comenzado hacerle el seguimiento a esa postura, in situ, midiendo y pesando cada uno de los huevos.
Considero que este hallazgo aportará detalles acerca de la historia de vida de Anolis huilae, aún desconocida.
Karen Cusick watched this brown anole down a tasty arachnid. Read all about it on Daffodil’s Photo Blog.
And here’s another lovely shot of the so-called festive anole from Karen’s post.
Photo by Karen Cusick
Image of the 1995 eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano on Montserrat. Photo from Wikipedia.
On July 18, 1995 something big happened on a tiny little island in the Lesser Antilles. The Soufrière Hills volcano erupted on Montserrat, an island only about 40 square miles in size that is nestled between Nevis, Antigua, and Guadeloupe. The eruption buried the (then) capital city of Plymouth under several meters of ash and pyroclastic flow. More than a dozen nearby towns were also destroyed. Residents in the south of the island had to evacuate, leaving their homes and land behind. Since then, Montserrat has experienced considerable volcanic activity. In fact, when I was on the island in 2010, I witnessed a major dome collapse, an event that was magnificent to see on the ground, and was even observable from space. I’ve spent some time trying to find Anolis lividus, Montserrat’s endemic anole, across the island, with particular focus on finding it in the south, where volcanic impact has been greatest. Montserrat is basically divided in half by the Belham River Valley, a barren bed of ash that effectively separates the habitable north of the island from the more inhospitable south. I’ve spent many hours in the south of the island searching for A. lividus over a few years. In my experience, the lizards were not abundant (if to be found at all) south of the Belham. Granted, access to this region was very restricted, so I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time there, but I only ever saw two lizards (a mating pair) on a tree in Richmond Hill, a part of the southern half that’s in Zone C. Towns in Zone C are close to the Belham River Valley and are occasionally opened up for visitors when the volcano has been quiet for a while. Currently, Zone C has ‘unrestricted access’, meaning people can visit day and night without an escort. There is also a relatively unexplored portion of Montserrat southeast of the volcano (the South Soufrière Hills) that has plenty of good habitat and is isolated by the rest of the island by the volcano. There have been a few focused expeditions to that part of the island (for example, to collect individuals of Leptodactylus fallax, the ‘mountain chicken’ frog, for a breeding program), but I haven’t been able to get there.
My interest in A. lividus lay mostly in understanding how recolonization works. Can the lizards cross the Belham River Valley, or is it too hot and inhospitable? As access to inner zones increases, will humans mediate transport into the south of the island? If they get there, will they persist? Although I haven’t been to the island in a few years, I remain very interested in the system. I recently received news on Anolis lividus from Nicolas Tirard, a new resident on the island. He had visited Zone C (which is currently open to daytime visitors) and found an individual of A. lividus. Nicolas informed me that he spotted the lizard (a male) on the terrace of an abandoned home in Richmond Hill, which is the same neighborhood where I found lizards almost six years earlier. Nicolas spent about 30 minutes canvassing this area and only found one lizard. For anyone with experience finding anoles in the Caribbean, particularly in the Lesser Antilles, we know that they are generally much more abundant than that. So I would reckon that lizards in Zone C are probably still pretty scant. I wonder if the lizard Nicolas did find descended from previous inhabitants in that area (for example, from the mating pair I observed earlier), or whether there have been more recent dispersal events. He went back on another occasion to St. George’s Hill, which he says is more densely forested than Richmond Hill, and saw three lizards there. When I visited St. George’s Hill a few years ago it was pretty barren, so clearly the habitat is recovering there.
Anolis lividus from Richmond Hill, Montserrat. Photo by Nicolas Tirard.
I asked Nicolas if he thought that humans were transporting the lizards (accidentally or otherwise) to Zone C through increased transit. Nicolas reckons the lizards can get there on their own right now. He says, “I don’t think it is a human-mediated recolonization, even if there is traffic going back and forth, because the vegetation has grown again in the Belham river, and it is probable that anole can now cross it by themselves.” The finding that the Belham is vegetated is interesting – during my visits there it was a hot, barren bed of ash. The only herps I saw there were enterprising iguanas, boldly basking on piles of hot ash. I also saw an iguana on the roof of a house once in Richmond Hill. As the exclusion zone becomes more accessible, I hope that people will try to find A. lividus (and other organisms) there and, hopefully, share their observations with the Anole Annals.
Nicholas shares his observations on his blog. He has also seen a blind snake (Typhlops) and several iguanas in the exclusion zone. Check out his blog for more.
Another image of the male Anolis lividus spotted in Richmond Hill. Photo by Nicolas Tirard.
Who knew there were so many fossil geckoes? In the first review of fossil geckodom in more than three decades, Juan Daza, Aaron Bauer, and Eric Snively examine 28 fossil geckos, providing new insights into whether the specimens can be confidently attributed to taxa. Some times, they can placed into extant genera, other times, especially for the older ones, it’s hard to say for sure just where the belong.
If nothing else, the fossils are cool and sometimes quite old, the most ancient, Cretaceogecko, dating back to the early Cretaceous.
This paper was part of a special of the Anatomical Record published last year, “New Advances In Morphology and Evolution of Living and Extinct Squamates,” which was previously discussed in these pages.
Here’s the abstract:
Gekkota is often interpreted as sister to all remaining squamates, exclusive of dibamids, or as sister to Autarchoglossa. It is the only diverse lineage of primarily nocturnal lizards and includes some of the smallest amniotes. The skeleton of geckos has often been interpreted as paedomorphic and/or “primitive” but these lizards also display a wide range of structural specializations of the postcranium, including modifications associated with both scansorial locomotion and limb reduction. Although the concept of “Gekkota” has been variously applied by different authors, we here apply a rigorous apomorphy based definition, recent advances in gekkotan morphology and phylogenetics, and diverse comparative material to provide a comprehensive assessment of 28 known pre-Quaternary geckos, updating the last such review, published three decades ago. Fossils evaluated include both sedimentary fossils and amber-embedded specimens. Known Cretaceous geckos are exclusively Asian and exhibit character combinations not seen in any living forms. Cenozoic gekkotans derive from sites around the world, although Europe is especially well represented. Paleogene geckos are largely known from disarticulated remains and show similarities to Sphaerodactylidae and Diplodactylidae, although resemblances may be plesiomorphic in some cases. Many Neogene gekkotans are referable to living families or even genera, but their geographic occurrences are often extralimital to those of modern groups, as is consistent with paleoclimatic conditions. The phylogenetic placement of fossil gekkotans has important repercussions for timetree calibration, but at present only a small number of fossils can be confidently assigned to even family level groupings, limiting their utility in this regard.
In a recent post, we discussed the description of two new Costa Rican anoles, but didn’t draw attention to the fact that all members of the A. pachypus species complex exhibit dewlap dichromatism, with the dewlaps of males and females differing within a species. Shown here are differences in A. tropidolepis (top) and A. pachypus (bottom). The images on the right are females and the left and center are males.
In a previous post, we discussed this phenomenon, but its explanation still escapes us. Interestingly, it occurs almost exclusively in mainland anoles.
Joe Martinez of the Museum of Comparative Zoology writes in: “I was recently contacted by Samantha Grantham, the collections manager of the Wenham Museum in Wenham Massachusetts, who would appreciate learning the identification of a lizard skeleton that resides in the Coffin Room of their Addams Family dollhouse. The dollhouse was constructed locally, presumably with artifacts that were readily available.
It appears to be an anole and Anolis carolinensis would have been available through the pet trade at that time. Anolis sagrei may have begun showing up in the pet trade as well by then. Can anyone give an authoritative identification?”
And want to learn more about the Addams Family Dollhouse? There’s a whole blog devoted to it!
McCranie and Köhler have just published an authoritative account of the 39 species of Honduran anoles. Rich in detail and thorough in coverage, this volume will be of interest to anyone interested in neotropical herpetology.
Harvard University Press’s description says it all: Caribbean members of this group have been intensively studied and have become a model system for the study of ecology, evolution, and biogeography, but knowledge of the anoles of Central and South America has lagged behind. In this landmark volume, veteran herpetologists James R. McCranie and Gunther Köhler take a step toward rectifying this shortcoming by providing a detailed account of the rich anole fauna of Honduras. Generously illustrated with 157 photos and drawings, The Anoles of Honduras includes information on the evolutionary relationships, natural history, distribution, and conservation of all 39 Honduran anole species. The work is the result of decades of study both in the field and in museums and is the first synthetic discussion of the complete anole fauna of any Central or South American country. Each species is described in great detail with locality maps. Bilingual (English and Spanish), extensively illustrated identification keys are also included.
Distribution maps are provided for all species.
Like all publications of the Bulletin of the MCZ and Breviora, the book is freely available as a pdf on the journal’s website. But a pdf just doesn’t look right on a bookshelf, not to mention getting soggy in the field. For those who really want to get the most out of this volume, why not consider purchasing it from Harvard University Press for only $24.95 (not bad for a 280 page volume jam-packed with color photos!)? And it’s even cheaper on Amazon (currently $20.48).
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
