Brown anoles (A. sagrei) thrive in urban environments.
More and more research is highlighting how living in cities impacts the organisms that exploit urban habitats. Some research in anoles even highlights how organism may be adapting via evolution to these novel urban habitats!
However, we still don’t know much about how urbanization impacts reptiles, and anoles are a great group in which to study these effects. A large team from the Kolbe lab at the University of Rhode Island set out to tackle the question of how living in cities can impact anoles by studying populations of both brown (A. sagrei) and crested anoles (A. cristatellus) in urbanized areas in Miami and remaining natural areas within the urban matrix. The team included two undergraduates at URI, Amanda Merritt and Haley Moniz (currently a MS student in Chris Feldman’s lab at UNR ) who were key contributors to the project.
We caught lizards at 7 different sites in the Miami area and measured their morphology, thermal preferences, and parasite loads. This research was recently published in the Journal of Urban Ecology.
We found that for all groups of anoles studied (male and female brown anoles, and male crested anoles), lizards living in the urbanized habitats were larger (see figure below), but showed no differences in body condition, or how much body mass they had per unit length. Larger body size can be associated with increased fitness in anoles, so the larger size of urban lizards could represent an advantage for anoles living in cities.
Lizards from urban (blue) habitats were larger than those from natural (green) habitats.
Despite cities being known to have higher temperatures (the urban heat island effect), including at our study sites, we found no differences in the temperatures that lizards from urban and natural sites preferred. Our preferred temp values were in line with those found for native range populations of these species, which suggests that we are not seeing adaptation of preferred body temperature to the warmer conditions in very urban parts of Miami. This means that lizards living in cities could end up having higher body temperatures than they would prefer, a potential cost to using urban environments, though see Andrew Battles’ recent paper for a more detailed look at this issue!
Lastly, we examined the presence of parasites in the body cavities of these lizards. Most of the parasites that we found were nematodes in the digestive tract, though we also found some pentastomids, crazy crustacean parasites, in the lungs of crested anoles! We found no difference in the presence of parasites in lizards from urban or natural sites, although brown anoles did consistently have parasites more often than crested anoles. When we looked at parasite infection intensity, or the number of parasites in lizards that had them, we did see that brown anoles in urban habitats had significantly higher parasite loads than those in natural habitats. This result indicates that increased parasitism could be a cost of living in cities for anoles, though it may vary from species to species.
Crested anoles from both urban (blue) and natural (green) habitats have similar levels of infection intensity (number of parasites) to brown anoles in natural habitats, but brown anoles in urban habitats show significantly higher levels of infection intensity.
Overall, our work suggests that there may be advantages (larger body size) and costs (non-optimal body temperatures, higher parasite loads) for anoles living in cities, and that these may vary even between species that are quite similar ecologically. Anoles are an emerging study system in urban ecology, so stay tuned for what should be a fascinating variety of papers on city-loving anoles in the near future!
Christopher J Thawley, Haley A Moniz, Amanda J Merritt, Andrew C Battles, Sozos N Michaelides, Jason J Kolbe; Urbanization affects body size and parasitism but not thermal preferences in Anolis lizards, Journal of Urban Ecology, Volume 5, Issue 1, 1 January 2019, juy031, https://doi.org/10.1093/jue/juy031