There be giants

Oh field work, how you delight me and try my patience.

Our first week in Jamaica can only be described as chaotic. The first ten days were bookended by having one less vehicle than planned—which meant one less vehicle than necessary for transporting our 14-person team—and by the earliest category 5 hurricane to ever be recorded. In between, there were mishaps with rain, car keys, WhatsApp accounts and the town (and our Airbnb) running out of water when road construction hit a water main.

Anolis garmani. Full sized adult male! Note the ridge of scales down its tail.

This site is in Portland Parish, on the northeast coast of Jamaica. Our Airbnb is right on the ocean and our field sites are a 30-minute drive up 300 meters of vertical distance into the hills. At night, temperature loggers tell us the forest reaches 100% humidity at about 23 degrees Celsius. Temperatures during the day are much hotter. Portland Parish is the wettest part of Jamaica, which is why we are sampling here—it matches the climate profiles of places we have already worked in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. However, such a damp environment with daily thunderstorms and downpours makes our work a challenge. Critical to our surveys are DSLR cameras, for every lizard that we see we take at least one photograph to help us quality control the species and sex identification of individuals. Unfortunately, our cameras are not waterproof and so if it starts to rain, we have strict protocols about covering the cameras. Luckily, despite raining every day, it never rained while we were actively surveying, and we were able to collect all the data at this site.

 Jamaica has seven species of Anolis lizard: Anolis garmani (crown-giant), A. grahami (trunk-crown), A. lineatopis (trunk-ground), A. opalinus (trunk), A. valencieni (twig), A. reconditus (high elevation specialist trunk-ground), and the invasive A. sagrei (trunk-ground). Now, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that Jamaica is missing a grass-bush anole. This is one of the confusing and delightful quirks of convergent evolution—why has Jamaica not yet evolved the last ecomorph?

The fewer number of species on Jamaica are also much more similar to each other, morphologically, than species on other islands. For whatever reason, these species are less distinct in morphospace. From our stamp-collecting perspective, this makes them much harder to identify and distinguish, although it is neat to see the similarities in behavior and colour pattern between these anoles and their ecomorph equivalents in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

Perhaps coolest, is the abundance of crown-giants and twig anoles. These anoles have been the rarest to see across all our previous field seasons and so spotting them now (even though they are not rare) leads to wild exclamations and cheers over the two-way radios. The crown-giants are a vivid lime green and at night look like goofy miniature dragons hanging off the edges of branches. They almost vibrate out of the dark forest canopy at you in the spotlight of the Magicshine headlamps. The twigs are a little harder to spot—they resemble lichen—but even so are distinct at night. Particularly when they tend to sleep on very thin twigs.

Peak fun this site was (gently) knocking crown-giants and twigs off high branches with the Staff of Power (a golf ball retriever). The goal is to catch the individual in the air before it hits the ground and scampers away, but as my hand-eye coordination leaves much to be desired, I was left to pounce on the lizards before they could run away. Even with that, we were three for three of all the animals for which we were aiming. Nothing like catching a crown-giant for a good `ole ego boost.