Restricted Morphological Variations of Brown Anoles (Anolis sagrei) between Their Native Cuban and Invasive Florida Vary – Anole Annals


Jars containing museum specimens are on a cart next to the shelf.

The ubiquity of Brown Anoles (Anolis sagrei) in Florida implies that they’re consistently on my thoughts. Given the proposition that speedy evolution could also be essential to invasive species success, I used to be curious to find out if invasive Brown Anoles within the southeastern United States, centered in Florida, have any morphological variations from Brown Anoles of their native vary in Cuba. To deal with this query, I measured museum specimens to check Brown Anole morphology between their invasive and native vary and “return in time” to see if Brown Anole morphology has modified since their invasion.

As reported in our current paper, Brown Anoles have broadly related morphology between their native Cuban and invasive Florida ranges. Moreover, we discovered no clear proof of the measured morphological traits altering over time. These outcomes recommend that speedy morphological evolution is probably not important to the success of invasive Brown Anoles.

Summary:

Understanding why some species and never others are profitable international invaders is a vital query in ecology and evolutionary biology. There’s a lot debate on the function that speedy post-invasion adaptation performs within the success of invasive species. Right here, we investigated alerts of speedy and broad-scale morphological evolution in Anolis sagrei (Brown Anole) between their invasive and native distributions. Though we discovered vital variations in a couple of morphological characters between invasive and native Brown Anoles, the morphological variation current within the species broadly overlapped between each populations and has not considerably modified during the last century. These outcomes recommend the invasive success of Brown Anoles in Florida is probably not resulting from main evolutionary change from their Cuban ancestors.

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