1. Hills above Moa
I just spent a week in Cuba, mostly in the far east, and found a few interesting anoles. Help with identification will be appreciated. Here’s the first batch (all from Moa-Baracoa area in the east).
2. Hills above Moa
3. Hills above Moa
4. Hills above Moa
5. Alturas de Baracoa
6. Alturas de Baracoa
7. Baracoa area
8. Coast west of Baracoa
9. Hills above Moa
9. Hills above Moa
10. Hills above Mo
11. Hills above Moa
The end of 2019 is nigh, and soon people will be traveling home to spend time with loved ones, eating a superfluous amount of cookies and sweets, and of course, working on that poster or talk for the 2020 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in Austin, Texas. SICB is one of the largest national conferences for biologists, where an incredible diversity of research is presented each year. And of course, SICB meetings are home to several Anolis presentations, with approximately 45 or more talks and posters this year featuring anoles.
Every year at SICB, Anole Annals tries to cover as many of the anole talks and posters as we can, and this year is no exception! AA relies on conference attendees to blog about all of the awesome anole work being presented, with a strong focus on undergraduate and graduate research. If you’re a student or student researcher attending SICB, blogging for AA is a fantastic way of getting experience in communicating science with a broader audience. In addition, if you are presenting work on anoles at SICB this January and want to help us blog, we’ll return the favor and cover your work for the blog! Anybody can join the AA family- undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. If you’re interested in blogging for AA at SICB this year, please shoot me an email at anthony.gilbert09@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post and we can get you going. We can provide assistance, examples, and answer any questions you may have when it comes to blogging for AA. Thanks all!
I am an enthusiastic hobby photographer. On walks or on vacation I always try to find animals and of course I am happy about every new species.
Among others I have found some Anolis in the last months. I’m not sure about the species or subspecies. That’s why I want to ask the experts for help.
I look forward to your answers. Many thanks in advance and greetings from Cologne, Germany.
Wolfgang
No 1, La Romana, Dom. Republik
No 2, La Romana, Dom. Republik, possibly Anolis distichus properus?
No 3, Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands, possibly Anolis acutus?
No 4, Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands, possibly Anolis acutus?
No 5, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis evermanni?
No 6, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico
No 7, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis evermanni?
No 8, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis cristatellus ?
No 9, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis cristatellus ?
No 10, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico
No 11, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis krugi ?
No 12, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico
No 13, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico
No 14, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, possibly Anolis stratulus ?
No 15, Corcovado National park, Costa Rica
No 16, Corcovado National park, Costa Rica
No 17, Corcovado National park, Costa Rica
No 18, Dominica, not far from Roseau, possibly Anolis cristatellus ?
No 19, Grenada, possibly Anolis richardii ?
No 19, Martinique, Chancel, Island, possibly Anolis roquet summus?
1st place: Anolis sagrei by Laurel Robertson
Thank you once again to everyone who participated in this year’s Anole Annals photo contest! As usual, we received tons of great photos, and we’re ready to announce the results. First up, the grand prize winner, is the above photo of Anolis sagrei from Port Saint Lucie, FL taken by Laurel Robertson. The second place winner is below, Anolis chloris from Parque Nacional Natural Tatamá, Colombia, by Jhan Salazar. Congratulations!
2nd place: Anolis chloris by Jhan Salazar
The rest of the winners are below, and their photos can be seen in the 2020 calendar here! Click the link to order your calendar. Do it now to take advantage of the Cyber Week sale – 50% off ending today!
Thanks to all who submitted photos for the Anole Annals calendar contest–we received lots of great submissions! We’ve narrowed it down to the top 27, and now it’s time for you to vote! Here’s a slideshow of the finalists:
Choose your 6 favorites in the poll below. You can click on the thumbnail to view full-size images in the poll, check the box next to your picks. You have 10 days to vote – poll closes next Sunday at 11:59pm (12/1). Spread the word!
Reader Roger Birkhead has asked for help ID’ing this Costa Rican anole on iNaturalist. Can anyone help?
Cabela is no longer selling telescopic panfish poles (see here). A quick review of alternatives (see here) did not find anything of comparable quality and price.
It has been a while since these were posted and I am wondering if anyone has found another equivalent product or has new insights on the alternatives? Or are people just repairing their old Cabela poles?
Thanks for the help,
Alex
Which anole species will grace the pages of this year’s calendar?
Another year, another field season (or seasons) come and gone, and now it’s time to share the great anoles we’ve seen! As in previous years, the Anole Annals team wants to see your best anole photographs for our 2020 calendar.
Here’s how it works: anyone who wants to participate will submit their favorite photos. The editors of Anole Annals will choose a set of 30-40 finalists from that initial pool. We’ll then put those photos up for a vote on this here blog, and the 12 winning photos will be chose by readers of Anole Annals, as well as a panel of anole photography experts. The grand prize winner and runner-up will have his/her photo featured on the front cover of the 2020 Anole Annals calendar, second place winner will have his/her photo featured on the back cover, and they’ll both win a free calendar!
Submit your photos (as many as you’d like) as email attachments to anoleannalsphotos@gmail.com. To make sure that your submissions arrive, please send an accompanying email without any attachments to confirm that we’ve received them. Photos must be at least 150 dpi and print to a size of 11 x 17 inches. If you are unsure how to resize your images, the simplest thing to do is to submit the raw image files produced by your digital camera (or if you must, a high quality scan of a printed image). If you elect to alter your own images, don’t forget that it’s 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 (more specifically, by submitting your photos, you are agreeing to allow us to use them in the calendar). We, in turn, agree that your images will never be used without attribution and that we will not profit financially from their use (the small amount of royalties we receive are used to purchase calendars for the winners). Please only submit photos you’ve taken yourself, not from other photographers–by submitting photos, you are declaring that you are the photographer and have the authority to allow the photograph to be used in the calendar if it is chosen.
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. Be sure to include your full name in your email as well. Deadline for submission is November 18, 2019.
Good luck, and we look forward to seeing your photos!
Photo by Karen Cusick from Daffodil’s Photo Blog.
How horrible! Read all about it on Daffodil’s Photo Blog.
Male Anolis cristatellus showing off his crest.
Anolis cristatellus is a great study species for investigating the effects of urbanization. They are widely distributed across the island of Puerto Rico, and occur at high densities in both forests and urban areas. By comparing the morphology, behavior, and physiology of lizards in these two habitat types, a number of anole researchers are currently learning about the effects of urbanization on this species and how the species is responding to these novel environments.
Anolis cristatellus is also named for the huge, beautiful tail crests that males often possess. They are one of a number of anole species to possess a tail crest (25 of ~425 described species have crests), but the function of the crest is still unknown. One of the only studies addressing anole tail crest function suggests that they might be used for signaling across large distances (Charles & Ord 2012), but other possibilities have not been tested. We thought that temperature may play a role as well, with the tail crest allowing increased heat transfer between the anole and its environment (similar to mechanisms that have been proposed for the dorsal fans on Permian synapsids).
My first Anolis, captured in 2012!
In our recent paper, we ( Kristin Winchell, Liam Revell and I) decided to study how these tail crests vary across Puerto Rico in urban and forested areas and test whether any variation we observe in crest morphology is associated with environmental variables that differ across these urban and forested habitats. To do this, we measured tail crest size across three populations using scans of lizard tails that I collected during my summer undergrad REU at UMass Boston many years ago. ‘Twas the first time I ever caught anoles! Sigh, memories…
We then tested whether tail morphology varied across our three sampled municipalities or across habitats types (urban and forest), and whether any observed variation was associated with temperature, precipitation, or openness (i.e. perch isolation).
A typical image of a scanned crest used in our analyses.
We found that tail crest size does vary across the three populations, but in each locality we sampled, urban lizards had larger crests. Interesting! Why might that be ? Well, it turns out that the environmental factors we measured also differ between urban and forest areas. The urban areas we sampled have higher temperatures than the forest areas. The larger tail crests in urban areas could therefore suggest a potential thermoregulatory role. But that’s not the only possibility presented by our data. Urban habitats tend to be more open, which could allow for longer sight lines between individuals, potentially supporting the hypothesis that larger tail crests are used for communication in open environments. But so far, our conclusions are necessarily limited. Nonetheless, even though we don’t know the function of the crest, the fact that crest size differs between urban and forested areas suggests that it’s under some sort of differential selection in these different habitats, which is quite intriguing.
We hope this paper can be a part of a larger body of research around Anolis (and squamate) tail crest function and evolution. Quite a few species have crests, but very few have been studied. If you have tail crest data/pics lying around, I encourage you to get them out there! In the meantime, feel free to read our full paper here.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
