To acknowledge, if not celebrate, the news that Anolis sagrei has become established on the Honduran Bay Island of Utila–which harbors three native species–we present this photograph of the first place that the species was discovered, a vacant lot in the middle of town. As you can see if inspect the photo, the introduction has been quite successful. But just how successful? How many brown anoles can you spot?
Brown anoles. Photo courtesy Bob Reed
Hello fellow scientists and photography aficionados!
My name is Veronica Gomez-Pourroy and this is week has been laden with firsts for me: first time living in the US, first week at the Losos Lab, and now… the first post in this brilliant blog!! I am a zoologist on my third semester of my Evolutionary Biology masters, and I’ve begun working on my first (of two) Master’s thesis. I will be investigating phenotypic variation in the widespread and very cool Brown Anole (Anolis sagrei), working with Jonathan Losos and Marta López Darias.
One of the elements we’d like to look into is variation in skin patterning and dewlap colouration – but at the moment I’m using specimens from museum collections and as we know, colour gets corrupted soon after an animal is “pickled.” For this reason, I am asking for your help to compile a comprehensive collection of pictures of A. sagrei–both males and females–that span most of their range. If you’d like to share your pictures with us, please email them to:
veronica.gomez-pourroy@evobio.eu
and include the location and, if possible, date when the photo was shot. I will be forever grateful for any help, and will acknowledge you in my thesis, of course!!
A huge thank you in advance, I’ll keep you posted on the progress made.
A brown anole is caught up in the web of an Nephila orb-weaving spider
Anoles eating spiders and spiders turning the table on anoles are well reported in both the literature and here on Anole Annals (1, 2). Recently, biologists Sarah French and Matthew Wolak of UC Riverside encountered this unfortunate Anolis sagrei that had been caught up in the web of an Nephila orb-weaving spider. Here’s what they had to say about the enounter: “We were at the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton. Matt & I were walking down the boardwalk, totally creeped out by the abundance of spiders, when we encountered the anole caught in a web. He was still alive, but pretty well caught. The spider didn’t seem entirely sure what to do with it, but she seemed to occasionally bite it, which caused the anole to jerk & thrash about for a few seconds. It was hard not to feel sympathy for the anole, but native species trump exotic, and so we refrained from interfering! (But we also didn’t stick around for too long to watch).”
Can anyone help with an ID of these anoles from the Dominican Republic?
Spoiler warning: May be A. cybotes, but maybe not…
Thanks!
Anolis agassizi. Photo by Margarita Ramos.
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.”
Anolis gundlachi. Photo by Alejandro Sanchez.
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.
Alex Gunderson may have had the best wedding ever! He and Katie tied the knot on June 1st at the Palm House in Tower Grove Park in Saint Louis. Alex adds that Katie “studies the evolution of anole perches (plants) or, more specifically, anole beds (she specializes in leaf shape evolution).”
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?