The days of self-isolation and quarantine are dragging on as COVID-19 continues its worldwide rampage. We may all be a little less productive than we had thought we would be as we tend to unruly kids and rogue parents who won’t stay indoors. Here at Anole Annals, we’ve scoured our past posts and brainstormed some of our favorite learn-at-home resources to help keep you entertained at home while learning about your favorite lizards! Whether you’re a seasoned researcher looking for a break, a teacher in search of remote learning activities, or a parent at home with kids in need of educational activities, we hope you find the following resources useful.
HHMI BioInteractive
HHMI produced several fantastic videos and learning modules perfect for learning about anoles, ecology, and evolution in the classroom and at home! Each of the activities also comes with handy educator materials to make sure your newly homeschooled students gets the most out of these resources.
The Origin of Species: Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree — This short video (~17 minutes) covers the concepts of adaptation, islands as natural laboratories, speciation, and convergent evolution. Pair the video with the associated interactive activities and discussion prompts to get the most out of this resource. Start with this one, since all of the other activities produced by HHMI relate back to the concepts covered here.
Lizard Evolution Virtual Lab — This all inclusive four part learning module involves videos and an interactive web application (also available for IOS) to learn about ecomorphs, phylogenies, experimental data, and dewlaps. Students will collect and analyze data as they learn about the scientific process and anole themed concepts. The modules also have embedded mini quizzes to make sure your student is understanding the information, and educator materials to help you guide your students as they learn.
The Lone Anole — This activity is a short conversation starter based on a photo of the Plymouth anole (Anolis lividus) to use with students to discuss ideas of adaptation and natural selection.
One of the sample cards for students to “collect data” from in the HHMI selection by predation activity.
Look Who’s Coming for Dinner: Selection by Predation — In this interactive activity, students are walked through the scientific process to learn how to develop a hypothesis, collect data, and analyze results with plotting and basic statistics. This activity is based on the study: Rapid temporal reversal in predator-driven natural selection (Losos et al. 2006). Everything you need to complete the virtual experiment is included!
Effects of Predation on the Niche of Lizards — This short activity guides students through interpreting a scientific figure from the study: Predation on a common Anolis lizard: can the food- web effects of a devastating predator be reversed? (Schoener, Spiller, and Losos, 2002).
How Lizards Find Their Way Home — This short video (8 minutes) is based on the research of Manuel Leal. Watch a real scientist design an experiment to answer a question and carry out fieldwork radio tracking lizards! Produced by Day’s Edge Productions.
Lizards in the Cold — This short activity based on the study Winter storms drive rapid phenotypic, regulatory, and genomic shifts in the green anole lizard (Campbell-Staton et al. 2017) teaches students how to interpret a scientific figure and is a good conversation starter for discussing natural selection and climate change.
Lizards in Hurricanes — Another short activity based on a study by Donihue et al. (2018): Hurricane-induced selection on the morphology of an island lizard. Students are asked to review a figure from the paper and discuss how hurricanes and other extreme weather events can lead to morphological change, and how scientists can experimentally investigate these changes.
Reproductive Isolation and Speciation in Lizards — This short animated video (~2 minutes) discusses the process of speciation and the role of the dewlap in reproductive isolation in anoles.
Using DNA to Explore Lizard Phylogeny — In this interactive activity students learn how to build a phylogeny based on common traits and then by using DNA sequences to explore the concept of convergent evolution. As with the other activities, everything you need to do this experiment at home is provided digitally.