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My Backyard Birding posted this video on Youtube, stating: “Five Brown Anole Lizards feeding voraciously on venomous Fire Ants in the backyard. I’m not sure this phenomena has ever been filmed before. Amazingly the common, but invasive, Brown Anole Lizards living in the backyard have evolved to enjoy a treat of invasive fire ants, probably because they have been around together for many years now.”
Can anyone confirm that these are fire ants that the anoles are eating?
This fabulous photo of a blue phase Anolis carolinensis was snapped by Will Talley of the Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo. It appeared in the Association of Zoos and Aquarium’s (AZA) monthly magazine, Connect, which sponsors an annual photo contest, and this photo was celebrated as one of the best entries.
Will kindly gave us the backstory: “I was biking down Hawthorne trail outside of Gainesville Florida and got to the Alachua Lake overlook. That’s where this guy was. I saw him on a section of the platform, got my macro lens out. As soon as I got the camera close he seemed to see his reflection and start displaying. It happens quite often with animals seeing their reflection, it seems.”
Will sent along another fine herpetological photo as well, and you can check out some more of his work on Flickr.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library just tweeted this figure from
Title
Abbildungen zur Naturgeschichte Brasiliens /
Title Variants:
Alternative: Recueil de planches coloriées d’animaux de Brésil
By
Wied, Maximilian, Prinz von, 1782-1867
It’s Plate 44, labelled, as you can see, as Anolis viridis and A. gracilis, but according to the tweet, they are both A. punctatus, male above and female below.
Photo by Eladio Fernandez.
Eladio Fernandez observed this interaction in Pedernales, Dominican Republic. He reports that the little fellow eventually escaped and lived to see another day.
Anolis bartschi. Photo by Shea Lambert. Check out his previous post, with more photos.
The long-running U.S. embargo has failed to topple the Castro regime in Cuba, but has done a good job of stymying research on anoles. Despite its great biodiversity, less is known about the Cuban fauna and flora than other Caribbean islands (despite the great efforts of Cuba’s excellent scientific establishment). I can speak from personal experience in saying that even though scientific research is one of the exemptions in the U.S. embargo law, getting permission from the U.S. and Cuban governments to work there has often been difficult. Recently (and probably still the case, though the U.S. government’s interpretation of the law is constantly changing), graduate researchers, in particular, have troubles because they are not considered “full time professionals” and thus not eligible to travel there under the research exemption.
Let’s hope that all restrictions are lifted soon so that the marvelous biodiversity of Cuba can be observed, studied, and conserved.
Anolis vermiculatus from another Shea Lambert post.
It’s common wisdom that formalin-preserved samples can’t be DNA sequenced because formalin degrades DNA beyond use . However, a paper recently appeared in Genome Research, describing successful whole genome sequencing of formalin-prepared samples.
If it is possible to sequence DNA from formalin-fixed specimens, then that opens up a world of genetic studies through space and time using museum specimens.
However, the samples in the Genome Research paper, besides being formalin fixed, were also paraffin-embedded, and probably deep-frozen, as they were cancer research archival samples. Paraffin embedding and deep-freezing may also be required for successful sequencing of formalin fixed samples. Thus, perhaps the method won’t work for samples stored for 75 years at room temperature.
I don’t have the expertise to say. Any of our more molecularly savvy readers care to venture?
If there is any DNA left behind, say after a short formalin fix followed by ethanol storage, then DNA sequencing of formalin-preserved samples should be the equivalent of ancient DNA approaches, no?
CITATION: Scheinin, Ilari et al. 2014. DNA copy number analysis of fresh and formalin-fixed specimens by shallow whole-genome sequencing with identification and exclusion of problematic regions in the genome assembly. Genome Research 24: 2022-2032. doi: 10.1101/gr.175141.1
Anolis aeneus in Trinidad. Photo by Clayton Hull.
Previously we’ve posted several photos [1,2] of green anoles supping from hummingbird feeders. Here’s another species doing the same thing, Anolis aeneus dining on sugar water in Trinidad. I wonder how many other anoles do this as well.
Many thanks to Renoir Auguste for bringing this to our attention.
A little while ago, we featured a photo of a baby knight anole about to be consumed by an orb-weaving spider. Now the movie adaptation has hit theaters, or at least Youtube.