Category Archives: Classics from the Literature

I previously introduced my mission to recognize the five anole systematists responsible for describing the majority of the anole species found in the Greater Antilles.  The first king of Greater Antillean anole taxonomy was the prolific E. D. Cope.  Cope … Continue reading →

Greater Antillean anoles would not be a model system for studies in ecology and evolutionary biology without the foundation provided by a century and a half of careful work by anole systematists.  Because their contributions often go unrecognized, I thought … Continue reading →

All anoles lay only a single egg at a time, but that doesn’t mean that no variation exists among species in reproductive cycles. Still the most comprehensive study of this topic is Licht and Gorman’s (1970) comparison of nine populations … Continue reading →

Herpetological Review has recently made available all the covers going back to the advent of color photographs in 1995. I found them on <a href=”https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.180287091987312.50983.178914018791286″>Herp Review’s Facebook page</a>. As far as I could tell, this shot of Anolis tranvsersalis from … Continue reading →

From Danielle Steel’s latest romance novel: “We have not far to go, indeed, to find our bi-colored masquerader; see the emerald-clad scamp as he eyes you from the brawny limb of the pecan, under which you stand. But what is … Continue reading →

  Today I had a chat with an evolutionary biologist who specializes on the evolution of tropical forests. We were discussing the effect of climate change on the Amazon, and he first made the point that dire warnings about the … Continue reading →

Wade Davis, explorer extraordinaire, made his name as a graduate student at Harvard by proposing not only that Haitian zombies were real, but that they were created by ingesting concoctions that include tetrodotoxin, the toxin in pufferfish and the infamous … Continue reading →

About a week ago, an esteemed foreign colleague asked if I had a PDF of Ernest Williams’ famous 1983 Lizard Ecology book chapter on the evolution of the anole ecomorphs.  I didn’t, nor did anyone else to my knowledge, so … Continue reading →

It was a long-standing paradigm in ecology that reptiles were consummate thermoconformers, essentially at the whim and mercy of environmental conditions. In 1944 this idea was challenged by seminal work by Cowles and Bogert who definitively demonstrated behavioral thermoregulation in … Continue reading →

Asked Juliet of Romeo, “What’s in a name?” I pose a question to all the Anolis enthusiasts out there: Have you ever heard of the genus Xiphocercus? How about Audantia? As it turns out, several species recognized today as belonging … Continue reading →

The figure above is a re-drawing from Schoener’s classic 1977 Biology of the Reptilia paper.  Though “Competition and the Niche” has been widely cited, this figure, buried in the midst of the 102-page opus, has not gotten the attention it … Continue reading →

A. Stanley Rand. 1964. Ecological distribution in Anoline lizards of Puerto Rico. Ecology 45: 745-752. Rand examined resource partitioning by seven Anolis species in Puerto Rico. Because of their general ecological similarity, Rand hypothesized that the anole species in Puerto … Continue reading →

In a recent Anole Annals post, Luke Mahler mentioned the pioneering work of Webster and Burns on variation in the Hispaniolan trunk anole, A. brevirostris.  This paper presents one of the most compelling cases for the occurrence of reinforcement—the phenomenon … Continue reading →