If you’re like me, you can’t get enough anole videos. So, what a surprise it was to learn that Cornell’s fabled Lab of O has a repository of 147 anole videos. Many of them are from Cuba, taken by Eric Liner, and include footage of Chamaeleolis, A. smallwoodi, and other cool Cubans. I haven’t checked most of them out yet, but it seems like a great resource.
Eric Enrique Flores de Gracia, a Panamanian graduate student based in the UK, sends in the following. Can anyone help?:
Besides my own Ph.D. research focus, I like to explore and monitor biodiversity of amphibians and reptiles among others, in the central mountains of Panama (part of the Talamanca eco-region). During a field campaign in the buffer zone of the Santa Fe National Park, we found a curious lizard on a Nispero (Terminalia amazonica) tree. Sadly, we were running out of time and only took the attached picture and since our main focus was not to survey herps at that moment, we released the lizard. I will appreciate if you have any clue as to what species it could be? By the way, we started a small monitoring program in 2011 in a never before explored area with some students from the University in Veraguas province.
Steve Poe writes: “Several island sites are famous among anolologists for harboring multiple sympatric species. Soroa in Cuba, La Palma in the Dominican Republic, and El Yunque in Puerto Rico each have been well-studied by community ecologists. But many mainland sites are populated by anole communities that meet or exceed the diversity levels of these island sites. One such hyperdiverse mainland locality is El Cope in Panama. Twelve species of Anolis may be collected within 100 meters of the field house at El Cope.
Identification of mainland anoles can be difficult as there are fewer resources available relative to those for anoles in the Caribbean. We have produced two-panel powerpoint guides for El Cope that should aid in identification of anoles in and around these sites.”
Small versions are attached below and the full size version can be accessed here (be patient on the download–it’s a big file).
Well, more precisely, anoles are more smarter than you might think than chimps are smarter than you might think, according to the Daily Planet TV that airs on the Canadian Discovery Channel. Yesterday’s episode includeded a segment “Ten Animals that Are Smarter Than You Think” that featured the cognitive abilities of Puerto Rican green anoles (A. evermanni) based on the work of (and showing a video made by) Manuel Leal.
Since my previous posts on Roatanian anoles, it’s come to my attention that A. sagrei has not been sighted on Roatan in quite a long time, and in fact some believe that it was never there at all. The photo to the left should dispel any such rumors. It certainly isn’t common–from my very brief time there–but it’s present. Said to be introduced in McCranie et al.’s book on Bay Islands herps.
You would have thought that Anolis allisoni couldn’t get any more handsome!
This one from Susan Perkins will be hard to top.
Photo by Janson Jones from dust tracks on the web.
That’s what’s happening in Florida, according to dust tracks on the web.
Sondra Vega, a graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico, writes:
A green anole eating a piece of fruit that fell from a bird feeder. Photo from http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_I_xaKqQzxyY/R4g96myXR_I/
In lizards, omnivory/frugivory is considered unusual and particular of some species; even though dietary studies indicate that many species add plant products to their diet. In spite of the fact that seeds and fruits have been reported in stomach content or fecal pellets of Anolis, their importance and contribution to the diet of these lizards is still unknown. At present, the general consensus is to categorize Anolis as strict insectivores. Therefore the extent by which omnivory/frugivory plays a role in the Anolis diet still needs to be assessed.
My research aims to determine how the variations in food abundance in two forests at the northern limestone region of Puerto Rico affect the degree of omnivory/frugivory and trophic position of Anolis lizards. I am using stable isotope technology to analyze the omnivory/frugivory and trophic position of the Anolis lizard as well to quantify the importance of fruits to the diet of the omnivorous Anolis species. Stable isotopes are a novel technique that has the potential to elucidate diets, capture interactions such as trophic omnivory, and track energy or mass flow through ecological communities. The information will help to better comprehend the functional role of Anolis lizards in the dynamic and structure of food webs and in ecosystem function, as well as the dynamics of vegetation in tropical forests. Although this project is focused on anole lizard species of Puerto Rico, the findings are of relevance for understanding of islands where lizards are also a dominant component of ecosystems.