Are Green Anole Populations Declining Due To Drought?

From http://www.thedrillpress.com/tex/2008-11-01/tex-2008-11-01-splinter-bgreenwood-04.shtml

AA reader Jim Jackson writes:

“I would like to suggest a topic for a post on Anole Annals:  Has anyone besides me observed a collapse in “their” local A. carolinensis population?  I live near Tallahassee, Florida, and have always had a large population of Green Anoles on my property; during September, 2011, there were at least 30 individuals around my house and on shrubs and small trees in the yard.  Even in May, 2012, there were a dozen.  Yesterday around noon I found an emaciated hatchling under a cover object.  Very odd.  I searched the property for active anoles and found none.

There has been a moderate drought here since 2010, and the larger-bodied flying insects (bees/butterflies) on flowers seem less abundant than in 2009.  Reduced food resources could explain a population decline, but the drastic change on my one acre seems hard to attribute solely to starvation.  There are no sagrei on my property.”

Anyone got any thoughts?

The Art of Hatching

A 2-dimensional ultrasound image of an egg inside a female A. carolinensis in 2008. Though I was supposed to be imaging human blood vessels during my doctorate, I snuck in some imaging of my anoles.

My first baby Anolis carolinensis hatched in 2003.  Since that time, I have had 9 eggs hatch.  Cultivating the eggs, feeding the tiny newborns and caring for the gravid females has certainly been a challenging adventure.

So far this summer, I’ve been fortunate to have 3 Anolis carolinensis eggs hatch under my watch. Below are some video clips of these delicate and inquisitive creatures as they emerge from their eggs and discover their new world. All videos are filmed in real time.

Hatchling #1 (aka Watson).
Below: Filming began when he was half way out of the egg. Note how a portion of the egg contents (experts, what is this?) remain attached after he emerges.

A New Fossil Iguanid From Late Pliocene South America


ResearchBlogging.orgAs impressive as their current diversity may be, anoles have a rather pathetic fossil record.  Aside from a smattering of subfossils that are less than a million years old, all we have to work from are a few amber specimens from the Dominican Republic preserved over a narrow temporal window (15-20 mybp).  This lack of fossils is problematic because molecular genetic data suggest that that Anolis may be more than 50 million years old.  The fossil record for anole relatives isn’t much better, with only a handful of well-characterized fossils that are greater than 10 or 20 million years old existing across Iguania.  Although they are relatively uncommon, previous reports of iguanian fossils have occasionally been sloppy about assignment to extant clades.  Daza et al. (2012) have done a remarkable job of clarifying our understanding of fossil iguanians by providing not only a remarkably detailed and nuanced description of a new fossil iguanian from the Late Pliocene, but also by conducting quantitative phylogenetic analyses that place this fossil in a large tree that includes a diverse range of other fossil and extant iguanians.

Anole Photo Of The Day

Tweeted by Meet Your Neighbors, who describes itself thusly: Founded in 2009, Meet Your Neighbours is a worldwide photographic initiative created by Niall Benvie and Clay Bolt. The project is dedicated to reconnecting people with the wildlife on their own doorsteps – and enriching their lives in the process. These creatures and plants are vital to people: they represent the first, and for some, the only contact with wild nature we have. Yet too often they are overlooked, undervalued.

Sunday Morning Anole Cartoon

From bird and moon comics: http://birdandmoon.com/threatdisplays.html

I spotted this on on Facebook thanks to Susan Perkins and Marc Tollis and new that it would be appreciated here at Anole Annals.

Entertaining Read On The History Of The British Museum Of Natural History

Richard Fortey is the author of a string of richly informative and entertaining books on the history of life on earth, including Life: An Unauthorised Biography. A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (1997), Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution (2000), and Earth: An Intimate History (2004).  More recently, Fortey turned his focus on the somewhat more recent history of the British Museum of Natural History, where he’s worked at for decades as a paleontologist.  In Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum (2010), Fortey provides a personal account of the evolution of one of the greatest natural history museums in the world.

Anoles Nab Another Journal Cover

Seems every few months, another journal has the good sense to put an anole on the cover. Most recent: the new journal Ecology and Evolution, which only took 19 issues to get with the program. We’ll be reporting on the article soon, but for now, enjoy the cover, which is another beautiful photograph by Neil Losin. And here’s a montage of all the recent covers…unless I’ve forgotten one.

Evolution Meetings 2012: Phylogeography Of Anolis Carolinensis

ResearchBlogging.orgAnolis carolinensis is increasingly used as a genetic model organism, but we know suprisingly little about the distribution of geographic genetic variation in this species across its native range.  At this year’s evolution meetings, Marc Tollis presented his recently published work on phylogeography of Anolis carolinensis.  His work provides basic information on geographic genetic diversity within A. carolinensis, and permits tests of hypotheses about the contribution of riverine barriers, sea-level changes, and southern refugia to this diversity.  Tollis sampled 190 anoles from 9 states and obtained sequence data from mtDNA and 10 novel nuclear loci (4 introns and 6 anonymous loci).  Using phylogenetic analyses and the Bayesian clustering algorithms in Structurama, Tollis identifies four major clades that appear to have diverged from one another around 2 million years ago: North Carolina, Gulf-Atlantic, Suwannee, and Everglades.  Although these populations appear to have experienced range expansions, Tollis rejects the southern refugium hypothesis because expansion events predate the inter-glacial, genetic diversity is no greater in the south, and there is no consistent pattern of northern genotypes nested within southern genotypes.  Instead, Tollis’s data points to a rapid and recent westward expansion.    Tollis’s work also rejects the hypothesis that rivers are important barriers to Anolis carolinensis dispersal, a result that he suggests is not surprising given the group’s well-established overwater dispersal capabilities.  Because this phylogeographic work on Anolis carolinensis rejects both the riverine barrier and refugium hypotheses, it appears that the distribution of genetic diversity is somewhat unique and not widely shared with other taxa distributed across the same region.  Phylogeographic analyses of A. carolinensis are long overdue and Tollis’s presentation and associated publication are a most welcome contribution to the field.

Tollis M, Ausubel G, Ghimire D, & Boissinot S (2012). Multi-Locus Phylogeographic and Population Genetic Analysis of Anolis carolinensis: Historical Demography of a Genomic Model Species. PloS one, 7 (6) PMID: 22685573

2012 Anole Photo Contest!!!

Grand Prize

Last year we had an Anolis photo contest and produced a 2012 anole calendar. Both were wildly successful. Today, Anole Annals is pleased to announce it is combining both. We herewith announce the 2012 Anole Photo Contest. The goal of the contest is to identify 12 winning photos.  The grand prize winner will have her/his photo featured on the front cover of the 2013 Anole Annals calendar and will receive an autographed copy of Karen Cusick’s lovely book, Lizards on the Fence. The second place winner will receive a copy of the calendar and have her/his photo featured on the backcover of the calendar.

This year’s calendar. Put your photo on the cover of next year’s version!

The rules: please submit photos as attachments to anoleannals@gmail.com. To ensure that submissions with large attachments arrive, it’s a good idea to send an accompanying e-mail without any attachments that seeks confirmation of the photos receipt.  Photos must be at least 150 dpi and print to a size of 11 x 17 inches. If you do not have experience resizing and color-correcting your images, the simplest thing to do is to submit the raw image files produced by your digital camera (or, for the luddites, a high quality digital scan of a printed image). If you elect to alter your own images, don’t forget that its always better to resize than to resample. Images with watermarks or other digital alterations that extend beyond color correction, sharpening and other basic editing will not be accepted. We are not going to deal with formal copyright law and ask only your permission to use your image for the calendar and related content on Anole Annals. We, in turn, agree that your images will never be used without attribution and that we will not profit financially from their use (nobody is going to make any money from the sale of these calendars because they’ll be available directly from the vendor).

Please provide a short description of the photo that includes: (1) the species name, (2) the location where the photo was taken, and (3) any other relevant information. Twelve winning photos will be selected by readers of Anole Annals from a set of 28 finalists chosen by the editors of Anole Annals.  The grand prize winning and runner-up photos will be chosen by a panel of anole photography experts. Deadline for submission is September 30, 2012.

Identify This Lizard In Miami

Name that anole. Photographs by Thomas E. Lodge

Tom Lodge of Thomas E. Lodge Ecological Advisors photographed this blue-bellied beauty at Fairchild Tropical Garden, Miami-Dade County, FL,  at 10:00am this past Sunday. The lizard is approximately 40-45 mm snout-vent length. Anyone want to take a crack at figuring out what it is? Clearly not A. sagrei. Could it be A. cristatellus, which occurs there? If not, what?

Another look

Page 228 of 299

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén