Suggests similar evolution occurs
on separate Caribbean islands
Date: June 17, 2016
Source: University of Toronto
A University of Toronto-led team
has reported the discovery of a new lizard in the middle of the most- visited island
in the Caribbean, strengthening a long-held theory that communities of lizards
can evolve almost identically on separate islands.
The chameleon-like lizard -- a
Greater Antillean anole dubbed Anolis landestoyi for the naturalist who
first spotted and photographed it -- is one of the first new anole species
found in the Dominican Republic in decades.
"As soon as I saw the
pictures, I thought, 'I need to buy a plane ticket,'" says Luke Mahler of
U of T's Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and lead author of an
article on the discovery published today online in The American Naturalist.
"Our immediate thought was
that this looks like something that's supposed to be in Cuba, not in Hispaniola
-- the island that Haiti and the Dominican Republic share," says Mahler.
"We haven't really seen any completely new species here since the early
1980s."
What's more, the new species
could help piece together a long-standing puzzle of similar looking species
that exist on different Caribbean islands.
"I got a grainy photo from
local naturalist Miguel Landestoy, who saw a nesting pair of birds that were
mobbing a branch," says Mahler. "He saw they were flying around what
he thought was a new species of heavily camouflaged anole clinging to that
branch." It wasn't possible to say much from the photo though, and Mahler
didn't think much of it. "You get all these people who say they found a
new species but it's almost always just an atypical individual of a very common
species," says Mahler. "So you get pretty hardened against thinking
claims like these are legit."
A few years after the initial
photo, Landestoy caught one of the lizards and emailed clear images of the find
to Mahler and several other researchers he'd been working with. "As soon
as I opened the email, I thought 'what on earth is that!?,'" says Mahler.
Well-studied ecologically,
Greater Antillean anoles are a textbook example of a phenomenon known as
replicated adaptive radiation, where related species evolving on different
islands diversify into similar sets of species that occupy the same ecological
niches.
Examples of this could be
long-tailed grass dwellers, bright green canopy lizards, and stocky brown
species that perch low on tree trunks, each living in similar environments on
more than one island.
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