In the week that followed Hurricane Beryl, we had been intending on camping in some high elevation forests neat St. Catherines Peak. However, due to landslides, power outages, and road closures, we pivoted to our plans to instead spend a week at Marshall’s Pen, in Manchester Parish.
Marshall’s Pen is one of the Great Houses of Jamaica and has its origins as a cattle property, then was involved in coffee production, and now is a private nature reserve and national heritage site. The old coffee storage house was converted into a guest space (where we stayed), is advertised in guidebooks, and is available for ecotours and bird watching. Marshall’s pen is in fact one of the birding hotspots of Jamaica and hosts 23 of the 29 Jamaican endemics across its 310 acres. Too bad I’m not a birder…
The forests around Marshall’s Pen bore stark evidence of Hurricane Beryl. Major damage to the forests seemed to be primarily restricted along paths (maybe due to a wind tunnel effect?). In the forest, there was a solid carpet of freshly shorn leaves and all the canopy above a certain height was shorn off as if with a giant weed-whacker. Interestingly, this did not seem to affect the lizards—either in abundance or in numbers of species.
Our forested plots (albeit with hurricane damage) ranged from 25-55 sightings of individuals per day across all possible species (A. garmani, grahami, lineatopis, opalinus and valencieni). Of note was the sheer number of A. garmani we were finding during the surveys. While at the previous site we had been impressed with ourselves for finding 2 crown-giants per survey session, at Marshall’s Pen we were each seeing between 2-5 individuals per survey, with very low rates of recaptures—ie there were lot of individuals, we weren’t just seeing the same 3 lizards over and over again.
For our fecal sampling work, we managed to catch TWENTY-THREE A. garmani. For reference, in previous years we would have been astounded and overjoyed if we were able to catch 5 crown-giants. This site was crawling with them, they were almost falling out of the trees on our heads (as an aside, this did happen last year, a giant A. barahonae jumped on my student’s head). This then begs the question if we are seeing more trunk-crown anoles because the canopy that they normally hide in is stripped away—causing them to be easier to see and/or to perch lower. Or maybe this is a special site that always has a high abundance of crown-giant anoles crawling around on fallen logs.
The other neat thing about this site was the plethora of cool natural history behaviours on display. One student got a photograph of a A. garmani (crown-giant) eating an A. opalinus (trunk anole). I saw, for the first time, two male anoles engaged in male-male conflict. Male anoles compete for territory and females by doing characteristic displays (dewlapping, head-bobbing) which can lead to a physical altercation involving head biting. For this reason, male anoles have evolved larger heads with strong bite forces (a subject of much research, see here and here). In one of my day surveys, I was able to capture this behaviour on camera and got to watch the surprisingly (to me) violent interaction. One of the males hung suspended off the ground in the jaws of the other. About 10 minutes later the two switched roles, and, as I had to continue surveying, I never learned which was the ultimate winner.
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