We’re just wrapping up a few last posts from last week’s World Congress of Herpetology in Vancouver. In a tour de force, Laura Rubio-Rocha presented two posters, side-by-side, in the first night’s session. We’ve already discussed her doctoral work on geographic variation in adaptation to different climates in A. carolinensis; here I briefly mention her poster on a high elevation Colombian anole that exhibits year-round reproduction in an environment in which there are two rainy seasons. This interesting study was recently published; you can learn more about it in our previous post on that paper.
In a comment on a previous post on anole olympians, Kevin de Queiroz dug into the archives to pull out this vintage Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue photo from 1980, featuring an Anolis cristatellus, as well as some woman in the foreground. Can you find that anole? Incidentally, it’s from the 1980 SI swimsuit issue, which you can access on their website; Christie Brinkley was on the cover and the photos were taken in the British Virgin Islands.
BBC host Michael Mosley with a Jamaican anole he captured
Our local PBS station has been airing episodes of the entertaining 2010 BBC series The Story of Science: Power, Proof, and Passion, hosted by medical journalist and doctor Micheal Mosley. The program recounts the history of major advances in science by focusing on the individuals responsible for them.
Episode Three, “How did we get here?”, tracks Evolutionary theory, from the development of geology, through Cuvier’s advances in comparative morphology and on to the field work that kickstarted Darwin and Wallace’s thought processes. In this episode Mosley follows in the footsteps of early collector Hans Sloane. Sloane, as you will recall from a previous post, assembled an expansive collection of Jamaican flora and fauna including anoles.
There is a brief segment where Mosley and his botanist guide construct small nooses and capture an anole, pictured above. I don’t know the Jamaican fauna well, but my guess is that he’s got A. lineatopus. Unfortunately I can’t find any video clips and the only picture available (above) is pretty grainy. If you’ve seen the episode or if you can make out the species from the picture above, let me know if I’m close in the comments.
UPDATE: The anole segment is online! Thanks to Jonathan for sleuthing this out.
Denizens of the Anole Annals – I need help with my breeding experiment! This summer I am conducting a common garden experiment with Anolis armouri and A. cybotes, two trunk-ground anoles from the Dominican Republic. Things were going pretty well with A. cybotes, but as of late both species have stopped laying. Anolis armouri didn’t lay very much at all in the past month. I have already finessed the dirt moisture in the laying pot and the temperature/humidity conditions are fine. In the interest of getting data, I would like to induce them to lay, perhaps with oxytocin? Does anyone out there have suggestions on what can be used to induce laying? Dosage? Timing? All your advice would be much appreciated!
A sampling of the anoles examined by Emma Sherratt
The World Congress called on Emma Sherratt to serve as the closer, presenting the last talk on the last day of the meeting. The choice proved brilliant, as she sent the audience off to the banquet in high spirits with a captivating report on her examination of 30+ specimens of amber-encased anoles. Emma has already wowed us with the images and videos she produces by micro-CT scanning; needless to say, the audience was amazed. Preliminary analyses suggest that multiple species are present in the sample (only one amber anole has been described in the scientific literature), and several of the types may match present-day ecomorphs. Her abstract:
Illustration by Ainsley Seago.
Travis Ingram reported on a new method he devised to test whether the anole radiations on the Greater Antilles are more similar than might be expected to occur by chance. We all know that each island has experienced its own radiation, producing more or less the same set of ecomorphs. However, some islands have more ecomorphs than others (Jamaica: 4; Cuba, Hispaniola: 6). In addition, there are non-ecomorph species on the larger islands. It is always possible that it is just a coincidence that the same types have evolved on multiple islands. After all, given large enough evolutionary radiations, one would expect the same morphology to evolve by chance on multiple islands. Travis developed a method to test this hypothesis, and found that, indeed, the Greater Antillean radiations are more similar in morphology than would be expected by random evolutionary change. Read all about it in the abstract:
At least vicariously. Track & field aficionado Kevin de Queiroz pointed out that A. aeneus featured prominently in this profile of Grenadian gold medal sprinter Kirani James. Check out at about the 1:00 mark above, or 0:53 in the nicer, official NBC version, but one requiring you to watch a short commercial first.
Sebastian Lotzkat presented a fascinating talk on geographic variation, both morphological and genetic, in Panamanian reptiles, emphasizing the highlands of western Panama. Although he discussed a wide range of species, he spent an appropriately large amount of time focusing on anoles, which if I recall correctly, he termed his favorites. To cut to the chase, he’s found very large amounts of variation in almost every species examined, including in some cases dividing species into several new species. Some of this work has already been chronicled in AA, and another paper will soon be reported on, but apparently there is a lot more yet to come. Read the abstract below the fold.
Anole brains. For scale, the partial coin is an American penny.
A pair of talks from Duke University took different approaches to examining anole smarts. Recently minted Ph.D. Brian Powell reported on his examination of the brain size and composition of different anole species. Brian reasoned that anoles living in different habitats would evolve differences in brain structure corresponding to the different challenges they faced, and thus that species that use the same habitat should have converged on brain morphology. However, results failed to support this hypothesis and instead indicated that the size of different brain components evolves in concert. More details below.
The three species that have demonstrated behavioral flexibility in the lab. Sure wish I could remember what the third point was
Later in the meeting, Manuel Leal reported on the cognitive flexibility of several anole species. Previous work has shown that A. evermanni is not only adept at solving novel problems, but can reverse previously learned patterns so as to ignore the stimulus that previously was rewarded and instead respond to a stimulus that previously hadn’t been rewarded. Leal has now extended that work to show that two other anoles can do the same. He then went on to test how adept anoles are at telling apart two similar patterns. He found, surprisingly, that they could tell very different patterns apart, but did not seem to be able to distinguish more similar patterns. Leal concluded by wondering whether minor differences in signals are detectable by receivers, which is an underlying assumption of many studies of sexual selection and communication. Manuel’s abstract is below the fold as well, although he went off-script in much of the talk he presented.