urban ecology – Anole Annals

Margaret McGrath at SICB 2020

If you look at a map of the United States at night, the urban areas are aglow with light pollution. Urban light pollution disrupts biological processes from gene expression to ecosystem composition across multiple taxa, including birds, insects, mammals, and fishes. With ever-increasing urbanization, understanding the effects of artificial light at night (ALAN) on organisms is crucial to future conservation efforts.

Margaret McGrath, an undergraduate in Dr. Christopher Howey’s lab at the University of Scranton, is examining the impact of ALAN on glucocorticoids in green anoles (Anoles carolinensis), which are commonly found in urban environments. Margaret specifically examined the impact of ALAN on the daily rhythmicity of corticosterone (CORT) and CORT responsiveness to an environmental stressor. She exposed green anoles to either a natural light-day cycle of 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark or 24 hours of light. After six weeks of exposure, Margaret performed competitive immunoassays to measure baseline CORT levels at midnight and noon. Additionally, she measured CORT responsiveness after placing the green anoles in a bag for 30 minutes to simulate an environmental stressor.

Anoles not exposed to ALAN displayed an expected CORT daily rhythmicity with higher levels of CORT during the day than at night. Anoles exposed to ALAN lost this CORT rhythmicity and maintained CORT at a level intermediate to the other group. In contrast, ALAN does not appear to impact the anoles’ CORT responsiveness to environmental stressors. Her results suggest that green anoles exposed to ALAN are still able to respond to environmental stressors. However, there could be downstream effects from the loss of CORT rhythmicity because it has been linked to arrhythmic activity in mammalian studies.

In the future, Margaret plans to investigate if the natural CORT rhythmicity can be regained by anoles exposed to ALAN when placed back into a natural light-dark cycle. This future research can aid in determining the longevity of ALAN’s impacts on organisms. You can reach Margaret at margaret.mcgrath@scranton.edu and find more about her research on chowey.net, Dr. Howey’s website.

Maintaining an already-impressive 2016 conference tour de force which included presentations at both JMIH and Evolution, Kristin Winchell presented a broad summary of her urban anole research in an invite-only Urban Ecology session at ESA 2016.

This presentation provided a synthesis of two large research projects both independently reviewed on Anole Annals (1,2), and so I will provide only a brief summary here. Kristin began by presenting an over-arching question in modern ecology: how is urbanisation going to affect biodiversity? While many may intuitively think of the process negatively, there is a large (and growing) body of research suggesting that many species are able to behaviourally respond to these novel environments and persist. So what about anoles? Kristin focuses her research on two Puerto Rican species: the crested anole (Anolis cristatellus) and the barred anole (A. stratulus).

To do this, Kristin and her team employed multiple methods to explore if a) these two species have differences in their ecology in urban vs. natural areas, b) if differences in ecology are observed, does this lead to differences in morphology, and c) if differences in morphology are observed, is this related to performance? Firstly, niche partitioning between these two species in natural vs. urban areas was investigated (more details here).

This niche partitioning research is new and will be the main body of a manuscript currently in prep so I will keep discussions brief. One species, A. cristatellus, was observed to significantly shift its microhabitat use, which resulted in adaptive shifts in morphology. This research was documented in Winchell et al.’s recent Evolution paper and reviewed previously on AA (1,2,3). Specifically, urban lizards have longer limbs and stickier toepads (higher number of subdigital lamellae) in response to perching on broader, slippier substrates.

This research has now developed on to the next stage of performance-related investigations. Kristin is asking the question of whether these observed morphological shifts lead to better performance (and therefore, presumably, higher fitness). Kristin presented some preliminary results, but keep your eye out for more developments!

Tag: urban ecology

SICB 2020: Artificial Light at Night Suppresses CORT Rhythmicity

ESA 2016: Niche Partitioning and Rapid Adaptation of Urban Anoles