Can anyone help with an ID of these anoles from the Dominican Republic?
Spoiler warning: May be A. cybotes, but maybe not…
Thanks!
Can anyone help with an ID of these anoles from the Dominican Republic?
Spoiler warning: May be A. cybotes, but maybe not…
Thanks!
Pat Shipman’s recent observations on a brown anole displaying at a fluttering orange flag, and her question about whether anyone has seen an anole paying particular attention to the color orange brings to mind the famous Chuckles experiment.
In the early 1970’s, a Smithsonian-led expedition visited remote Malpelo Island in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Colombia. To make a long story short, the researchers noted that the endemic A. agassizi, a very interesting species in its own right, seemed to have a thing for orange objects. To test this hypothesis, they turned to Chuckles, the hard jelly candy that comes in five colors, one of which is orange (and which, fortuitously, they had a package available on the ship on which they were based, there being no land accommodations on Malpelo).
Bottom line: the anoles do, indeed, prefer orange and yellow. Read all about it in this snippet, extracted from the article:
Rand, A.S., G.C. Gorman, and W.M. Rand. 1975. Natural history, behavior, and ecology of
Anolis agassizi. Smithsonian Contributions in Zoology 174:27–38.
I describe the experiment and an abortive attempt to follow up on it in Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree (footnote 189, p.146):
No discussion of anole frugivory and feeding behavior is complete without mention of the famous Chuckles® experiment. On an expedition to remote Malpelo Island off the coast of Colombia, Rand et al. (1975) noted that the native anole of the island, A. agassizi, was attracted to the orange cap of a bottle of suntan lotion and to the orange packaging for Kodak film, and would come running from great distances and in great numbers when half of an orange was placed on the ground. The intrepid biologists wondered whether these anoles had a particular predisposition to the color orange. Fortunately, the expedition was outfitted with packages of Chuckles®—billed as “America’s most popular jelly candy” in a 1949 advertisement—which conveniently contain candies in five colors: orange, yellow, red, green, and black. By placing various combinations of these sweets on the ground, the authors found that anoles are most attracted to orange and yellow candies, and least attracted to black ones.
But the story does not end there. In an effort to extend this research program to additional species, a graduate student in my laboratory tested a captive A. grahami with differently colored Starbursts®, a non-jellied candy that also comes in different colors (Chuckles® may not have been available in the local vending machine). Unfortunately, this experiment was stymied by other members of the lab, who removed lizard-bite sized pieces from the candies, thus briefly convincing the experimentalist that he was on to a major discovery.
Ever wondered what the most viewed post on Anole Annals is? I bet it keeps many of you up late at night trying to guess. So, I’ll tell you. Over the last year, the single most viewed page is the one entitled “The Proper Pronunciation of ‘Anole’.” In that post, an AA reader asked how to pronounce our favorite noun, and many readers responded.
But that was more than two years ago, and languages evolve swiftly. Moreover, many have joined AA’s readership since then. So, I’ll throw out the question again. For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts, as expressed Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree (p.10):
“…honorable, right-thinking people can disagree over whether the correct pronunciation is uh-nole or an-ole. I am less charitably inclined to my ninth grade biology teacher’s uh-no-lee, but, although I have never heard “anole” articulated in that way by anyone else, I am told that it is common in the South, from whence she came (I was surprised to find that this is the preferred pronunciation of the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, according to www.dictionary.com).
As for the origin of the name, Daudin [1802], who named the genus, said that “anolis” was the name the indigenous Caribs used for these lizards. However, there is some possibility that in fact “anolis” may have been their name for lizards in the genus Ameiva and that the correct Carib word was “oulléouma” (see discussion in Breuil, 2002). Right or wrong, Daudin clearly chose the more mellifluous name to bestow upon these lizards! A more interesting, though doubtless less accurate, explanation is the Saba Tourist Bureau’s statement (www.sabatourism.com) that “The scientific name of ‘Anolis’ comes from the popular name of “anole” for these lizards. Anole is an ancient African name, meaning “little devil”, that is given to small lizards in western Africa.”
Father Sanchez has done it again! Here’s his commentary accompanying this lovely photo: “… today I was at the Guajataca State Forest. The lowland forms of Anolis gundlachi (one of my favorite anolines) are quite smaller – and frequently paler – than those of the highlands. Incipient speciation? One can only hope.”
As for the occurrence of the cool-loving A. gundlachi in lowlands, see the discussion of this stemming from the recent symposium on the effect of global warming on ectotherms.
A previous discussion on this blog has raised the following question: in which situations is a lizard most likely to lose its tail? Common wisdom has it that tails are most frequently lost in the avoidance of predators, and observational evidence backs this up, at least in the case of anoles–no AA reader has observed tail loss in a male-male aggressive interaction. But what about other lizards?
In Sitana ponticeriana, an agamid lizard that I often post about on this blog, a couple of observations point to the likelihood of male-male competition as a driver of tail loss. Tail loss is not uncommon–in the locality I have sampled best, 13.5% of lizards have lost their tails. Males are about 1.7 times as likely to lose their tails as females (16.5% of males vs. 9.6% of females). Further, lizard predators aren’t too common in this locality–fewer than 30 individuals of potential lizard predator species were spotted or heard in over two months of sampling, and no predation attempts were observed.
But more excitingly, I had the chance to observe firsthand the loss of a tail during a male-male fight this summer! The resident lizard had lost much of his tail prior to the fight, a measly 5.4 cm remaining. The intruder, however, had an almost complete tail. Here is a rather blurred photo of the two males facing each other:
In his beautiful monograph on anoles of Guadeloupe (A. marmoratus ssp), Lazell (1964, 1972) showed the existence of a large variability of phenotypes and described six subspecies of Grande-Terre and Basse-Terre , i.e. A. m. inornatus, A. m. speciosus, A. m. setosus, A. m. girafus, A. m. alliaceus and A. m. marmoratus (see my previous post “The anoles of Guadeloupe“). However, as Lazell indicated Lazell in 1964, “there exists between two distinct populations occupying different geographic areas a zone in which “intergrade” individuals assure continuous gene flow betweens the two extremes.” In other words, the classical subspecies could be considered as extremes that would be relatively few relative to the entire population of Guadeloupe anoles.
Within the framework of a project funded by the National Park of Guadeloupe and the University of Lyon (France) and in collaboration with the DEAL of Guadeloupe, we have identified this year the population of anoles on Basse-Terre and Grande-Terre. 120 stations distributed over the entire territory were studied. 687 anoles were characterized and 260 genetic samples were taken. This study demonstrated the existence of extreme variability of phenotypes between stations and within each station, with a minority representation of the subspecies classically described in the literature. This variability is represented by the poster below. This result leads us therefore to question the relevance of currently distinguished A. marmoratus subspecies as well as on the work of the field experimenter. What should be the selection criterion to select an individual on a station? Should it be random regardless of the phenotype, or should we select the one that is closest to the referenced phenotype, although this phenotype is a minority within the population?
AA reader Angel Sosa sends the attached photo and writes: ‘During monitoring of amphibians and reptiles in Cerro Azul region of Alto Chagres, Panama, I photographed three moth flies on the back of Anolis lionotus. The moth flies had bellies full of blood, which is clearly seen in the photograph. It’s the first time I have seen this group of arthropods feeding on a reptile. This is an endemic area of leishmaniasis, but little is known of the ecology of parasites in reptiles and their medical importance.”
Aloha, my name is Amber Wright and I’m a first-time poster here on Anole Annals. I did my dissertation on niche variation between native and introduced populations of brown anoles, with field sites in Hawaii, Florida, Little Cayman, and the Bahamas. I will be starting up a new lab at the University of Hawaii, Manoa in January 2014, so look forward to future posts on Anolis vs. Phelsuma, and get in touch if you’re interested in joining the lab!
As covered in previous posts on Anole Annals (e.g. 1, 2), our team has been studying the effects of seaweed subsidies on near-shore food webs in the Bahamas where Anolis sagrei is a key predator. While studies published to date have detailed the effects of seaweed on direct and indirect interactions among lizards, insects, and plants, our most recent paper focuses on how lizards are able to capitalize on seaweed-derived resources.
To briefly summarize the most relevant previously reported lizard results (Spiller et al. 2010), when we added seaweed to experimental plots we found that lizards switched from foraging on terrestrial prey to consuming seaweed detritivores, and that lizard density increased by about 60%. We saw an initial increase in density within the first three months, suggesting that lizards quickly moved into plots to take advantage of the seaweed. However, peak lizard abundance was observed a full year after the initial subsidy, which suggested that a lagged reproductive response could also be contributing to the overall increase in lizards.
We analyzed mark-recapture data from close to 500 individuals over the 20-month experiment to try and figure out how lizards could be turning resource input into reproductive output. We found that subsidized lizards did not survive better or have better body condition than unsubsidized lizards, but they did grow 30% faster.
A 30% faster growth rate may not seem like much of an advantage, but achieving reproductive size sooner could be a big deal in light of some key aspects of anole life history. While A. sagrei can reproduce over much of the year, there is a period of reproductive quiescence during the winter. Having a breeding season coupled with the fact that anoles can reproduce continuously (about an egg a week for A. sagrei) means that when you reach maturity during the breeding season constrains how many eggs you can produce.
We fit a model of individual growth to the mark-recapture data to quantify this effect, and proposed the following scenario shown in Figure 3 from the paper below. Lizards hatching very early in the season reach reproductive size before or near the start of their first breeding opportunity regardless of whether seaweed is present; the difference therefore lays in the lizards that hatch late. Late-hatching lizards without access to seaweed do not reach reproductive size in time to lay any eggs and must survive until the next breeding season to reproduce. Subsidized lizards that hatch late are able to catch up a bit, hitting reproductive size in time to take advantage of at least half of their first breeding season. Averaging egg production over all possible hatch-dates in a year, these growth differences translate into subsidized females laying an average of 16 eggs vs unsubsidized females laying an average of 8 eggs in year one. That’s a doubling in fecundity due to seaweed addition.
On our recent trip to Mexico, we had been warned that brown anoles were spreading beyond the coast, and sure enough, we found ’em. The photo above is a female A. sagrei we spotted in the parking lot of our point five-star hotel located in downtown Chinantla, Veracruz, Mexico. The photo ain’t pretty, but the ID is unmistakeable: them’s Cuban emigres, doing just fine in the Mexican heartland.
We actually found brown anoles at two spots in Chinantla. The other was a small, bright green pained shack near the intersection of the highway and the main road through town. A bunch of female and juveniles brown anoles were running up and down the walls of the shack, easily seen from the side of the road. You can’t miss it, not only due to its bright color, but also because of the transit police standing in front, randomly waving over cars–especially those driven by oddly-attired biologists–and then finding problems with their registration or what-not. In fact, you’ll have plenty of time to watch the anoles as the officers explain at great length why they will have to impound the car, even though it is a rental and you are five hours from Veracruz, where your flight leaves the next morning, because the car’s tax certificate for 2013 is not plastered to the back window. You’ll probably be distracted by your colleague on her cell-phone berating the rental car office, but stay focused, even when–finally–the police officers realize (as the rental car people predicted) that it is possible to pay the registration tax, on the spot, in cash, and without being given a receipt. Any way, that’s where to look for brown anoles in Chinantla.
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