Yesterday we introduced you to four new species of Anniella, or legless lizards, found here in California.

The creatures, previously thought to be categorized under one species known as Anniella pulchra, were described in yesterday’s publication as separate, new species with their own name, range and type locality. Each species was named after a California naturalist that had some association with UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), home of co-author Ted Papenfuss; and the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), where co-author James Parham (now at Cal State Fullerton) was a PhD student. The biographies behind these taxonomic namesakes offer a fascinating glimpse into the history and impact of the museums. We thought we’d reveal their stories here today.

Anniella alexanderae is named after Annie Alexander. According to the MVZ website,

She was a naturalist, an intrepid explorer, and an extraordinary patron at a time when women did not have the right to vote and few had any involvement with the world outside their homes.

In 1908, Alexander donated $1 million in an endowment for the creation of the MVZ. The gray-bellied Anniella alexanderae is found in the southwestern San Joaquin Valley, near the town of Taft.

Alexander hired MVZ’s first director, Joseph Grinnell. The recently named purple-bellied species, Anniella grinnelli, is named after him. Even in the 1930s, Grinnell was concerned about conservation. From MVZ’s website:

As a visionary, he could see that the rich and unique vertebrate fauna of California was under siege from increasing impacts of human population growth and unsustainable land use practices.

Anniella grinnelli was discovered in a vacant lot behind the Home Depot in Bakersfield a few years ago. That lot is now developed. In yesterday’s paper, the authors placed the type locality for this species in a reserve that has been set aside to protect the endangered Bakersfield cactus.

Charles Camp was an undergraduate under Joseph Grinnell at the MVZ and later became director of UCMP, which was also created by Annie Alexander. Anniella campi, a yellow-bellied lizard with a double stripe, is named after Camp. In 1915, at the ripe age of 20, the young Camp discovered a new salamander species in California—“a major discovery because its nearest relative was found in Italy!” exclaims Papenfuss.

Anniella campi has the smallest range of all of the new California legless lizard species, occurring in just a few canyons that drain out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and into the Mojave Desert. Papenfuss describes it as a relict: “It dispersed long, long ago when there were moister conditions.”

The yellow-bellied Anniella stebbinsi is named after Robert Stebbins, a herpetologist at MVZ, who was Papenfuss’s advisor. Stebbins, now 98 years old, grew up in the Santa Monica Mountains in southern California. It’s fitting, then, that Anniella stebbinsi’s range is the southern-most of the five California species.

Its type locality is at Los Angeles International Airport—no kidding. “The west side of the main runway at LAX,” Papenfuss confirms. “There are big sand dunes between the runway and the ocean, and the sand dunes are protected due to an endangered butterfly that lives there and nowhere else.” That’s good fortune for Anniella stebbinsi, too. “Everything else around that area is urban sprawl.”

Fascinating reptiles deserve fascinating names and homes!

Anniella grinnelli image: Alex Krohn

“You don’t have to go to remote places to find biodiversity,” says UC Berkeley’s Ted Papenfuss. “California has so much biodiversity we’re not even aware of.”

Papenfuss is talking about several new, colorful species of legless lizards that he and California State Fullerton’s Jim Parham describe in a new paper, out today in Breviora, a Harvard publication.

Legless lizards, or Anniella, are “cuter than snakes,” says Parham and also distinctive from the other, better-known legless reptiles. For example, “Anniella have eyelids—snakes don’t,” Parham explains. “Legless lizards, like other lizards, can also lose their tails to escape other predators,” adds Papenfuss. “Snakes unhinge their lower jaws to eat their food whole. Lizards, including Anniella, have to chew their food.”

Parham and Papenfuss published a paper in 2009 about a known California species, Anniella pulchra. Through genetic testing of new specimens and museum collections, including the Academy’s, they determined that there are likely more than just the one species of legless lizard here in California. Today’s paper describes four new species.

Confirming the previous genetic work, the team identified Anniella alexanderae, Anniella campi, Anniella grinnelli and Anniella stebbinsi, each occupying a distinct geographical range. The previously known species—Anniella pulchra—has a yellow belly, and the new species have yellow, silver, or purple bellies. The new species can be further distinguished visually by their number of scales or vertebrae. But, the main difference is determined by DNA, which shows that these species diverged from each other millions of years ago.

As Papenfuss noted above, biodiversity can hide in the most obvious places (such as California), but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find. The trick with these animals is they live underground. They can often be found under logs or leaf litter where there will be some dampness and insects to eat. But, logs and leaf litter aren’t always present in the sand dunes, deserts and grasslands Anniella prefer.

So Papenfuss invented his own “litter”—literally, says Parham. “He’s essentially littering, with permission.” Papenfuss admits he “dumpster dives” on the UC Berkeley campus looking for cardboard. He uses the flattened pieces as man-made leaf litter in the places he thinks Anniella like to hide and leaves the litter out for months as at time. However, he learned quickly to cover the cardboard with some tarpaper, because cows were eating the uncovered cardboard.

Despite today’s publication, Papenfuss isn’t finished dumpster diving. “This is only the beginning of the story,” Parham says. “We need to further study each species’ distribution. At this point, each species has quite small ranges and if that’s truly the case, more monitoring of their habitat needs to be done. If we lose those small spaces, we’ll lose those species.”

Citing human development such as urbanization, agriculture, and oil/gas exploration as threats to the species, the team realizes they’ll have to work quickly to determine where these species occur and how to protect them and their habitats.

By the way, do the new species’ names sound familiar? Each is named after a famous California naturalist—tomorrow we’ll look at the namesakes and ranges for each new species.

Image: James Parham

Female Komodo dragons live about half as long as their male counterparts because the physically exhaustive nature of housework, such as building huge nests and guarding eggs from predators, leaves them weak.

The Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) is the world’s largest lizard—sometimes reaching ten feet in length! Their formidable body size enables them to serve as top predators. They are able to kill water buffalo, deer, wild boar, and even humans.

Researchers from Australia, Indonesia, and Italy tracked 400 individual Komodo Dragons living in eastern Indonesia for ten years and produced a model of the dragons’ growth rate, published recently in the journal PLoS ONE.

Males and females grow at the same rate and remain the same size until age seven, when they reach sexual maturity. From then on, females start putting all their energy into the chores of motherhood, which makes them grow more slowly and die younger.

Meanwhile, the males’ energy reserves go into growing their bodies larger and larger to give them an edge in competing with other males for females and territory. The researchers found that male Komodo dragons live an average of 60 years, while females average just 32 years.

Professor Tim Jessop from the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne and a co-author on the study says that “these sex-based differences seem to be linked to the enormous amounts of energy females invest in producing eggs, as well as building and guarding their nests, a process that can take up to six months, during which they essentially fast, losing a lot of weight and body condition.”

The results could have dramatic consequences for the survival of this endangered species. Conservationists estimate that up to 5,000 individuals remain in the wild, but just 350 are breeding females. Early mortality of females affects fertility rates, making it more difficult to mate, and may be aggravating competition between males over the remaining females. The study could help conservation efforts.

Zuberoa Marcos is a former biologist and current science writer based in Barcelona. She writes articles regularly for Science Today.

Las “labores del hogar” acortan la vida de las hembras de dragón de Komodo

Por Zuberoa Marcos

Las hembras de dragón de Komodo viven, en promedio, la mitad que los machos debido al esfuerzo físico que requieren labores como construir los nidos enormes y proteger los huevos de los depredadores.

El dragón de Komodo (Varanus komodoensis) es el mayor lagarto del mundo. Su tamaño enorme les permite ser depredadores voraces. Son capaces de matar búfalos, ciervos y jabalíes e incluso atacar a seres humanos.

Investigadores de Australia, Indonesia e Italia han realizado durante 10 años un seguimiento de 400 dragones de Komodo que viven en el este de Indonesia, su único hábitat natural. Con los datos obtenidos, el equipo elaboró un modelo de la tasa de crecimiento del dragón. Los resultados has sido recientemente publicados en la revista PLoS ONE.

Machos y hembras crecen a la misma velocidad y tienen el mismo tamaño hasta que alcanzan la madurez sexual, lo cual ocurre alrededor de los siete años de edad. A partir de entonces las mujeres destinan toda su energía a la maternidad, crecen más lento y mueren más jóvenes.

Mientras tanto, los machos emplean sus reservas de energía en hacerse más grandes para poder competir con otros machos por las hembras y el territorio. Los investigadores han descubierto que los dragones de Komodo macho viven un promedio de 60 años y las mujeres sólo 32.

El profesor Tim Jessop, del Departamento de Zoología de la Universidad de Melbourne y co-autor del estudio, comenta que “estas diferencias entre sexos parecen estar vinculadas a las enormes cantidades de energía que las hembras invierten para producir los huevos, construir y cuidar sus nidos, un proceso que puede durar hasta seis meses, durante los cuales pierden mucho peso y su cuerpo se torna frágil. ”

Los resultados podrían tener consecuencias dramáticas para la supervivencia de esta especie en peligro de extinción. Los conservacionistas estiman que hay unos 5,000 individuos en la naturaleza, pero sólo 350 son hembras en etapa reproductiva. La mortalidad precoz de las hembras está dificultando el apareamiento y puede estar agravando la competencia entre los machos por las pocas hembras. El estudio podría ayudar a los futuros esfuerzos de conservación.

Zuberoa Marcos es bióloga molecular y actualmente trabaja como productora de TV y periodista científica. Escribe de forma regular para Science Today.

Image: Sleeping Komodo dragon, Wikipedia

ScienceNOW reports that:

Tails are often an enigma; many creatures have them, but scientists know little about their function, particularly for extinct species. Dinosaur tails are no exception. Researchers have speculated that some species’ tails were used in fighting, whereas others for stability.

Our friend Robert Full and his colleagues at UC Berkeley found how when leaping, red-headed African Agama lizards swing their tails upward to prevent them from pitching head-over-heels into a rock. You can see a video of this feat here.

“We showed for the first time that lizards swing their tail up or down to counteract the rotation of their body, keeping them stable,” says Full. “Inspiration from lizard tails will likely lead to far more agile search-and-rescue robots, as well as ones having greater capability to more rapidly detect chemical, biological or nuclear hazards.”

While Full is a biology professor, he is no stranger to robots, Scientific American reports.

These are just the latest developments in Full’s full-on flirtations with robots. He has worked with engineers since the mid-1990s when he helped to develop the crab-inspired Ariel, a minesweeping robot… that can look for buried explosives in surf zones. In 2008 Full co-founded the Center for Integrative Biomechanics in Education & Research (CiBER) at University of California, Berkeley, to further integrate the work of biologists and engineers when designing technology.

“Engineers quickly understood the value of a tail,” UC Berkeley engineering graduate student Thomas Libby explains. “Robots are not nearly as agile as animals, so anything that can make a robot more stable is an advancement, which is why this work is so exciting.”

Full and his team received a surprise benefit from the lizard tail research: understanding how dinosaur tails function.  The new research tested a 40-year-old hypothesis that the two-legged theropod dinosaurs—the ancestors of birds—used their tails as stabilizers while running or dodging obstacles or predators.

Indeed, just like the velociraptor depicted in the movie Jurassic Park, these agile dinosaurs may also have used their tails as stabilizers to prevent forward pitch, Full says. “Muscles willing, the dinosaur could be even more effective with a swing of its tail in controlling body attitude than the lizards.”

The research is published in the recent edition of Nature.

Image: Robert Full lab, UC Berkeley

The “awwww, how cute” part of this article

We couldn’t pass this article by—river turtle embryos that communicate with each other to coordinate when they hatch! The research, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrates that Murray River turtles speed up to catch up with their faster developing siblings. Wired UK reports:

Achieving this synchronicity isn’t easy. Although the eggs are always laid at the same time in the same nest, those at the top of the nest near the sun-drenched soil develop much faster than those buried deeper in the cooler soil. However, Murray River turtles are able to tell whether their fellow hatchlings are more or less advanced and adapt their pace of development accordingly, allowing the slow-coaches to play catch-up.

The study authors are still unsure how and why the turtle embryos do this. Stay tuned…

Just as cute are photos of developing Anolis lizards on New Scientist. Researchers hope that images like these will help us understand more about vertebrate development.

Our favorite traveling worm, C. elegens

This week, Universe Today noted that the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans) could be the first earthling to Mars. C. elegens is no stranger to space travel, its traveled a few times on various space shuttle missions. They do well in space, developing and reproducing normally. So how about deep space travel? Universe Today says lucky worms, but there is a broader purpose:

Similar biologically to humans in some ways, they are being studied by scientists at the University of Nottingham in the UK to help see how people are affected by long-duration space travel.

Kepler 21-b

Might this be C. elegens’ destination after Mars? Not likely. The latest confirmed exoplanet is 350 light years (2000 trillion miles) away and hot, hot, hot! It orbits its parent star much closer than Mercury orbits the Sun, but it is Earth-like in its size and mass. So what makes this one so special? We’re getting closer, says Discover’s Bad Astronomer:

this is an amazing detection; the planet is pretty small, very far away, and its parent star very luminous. These all combine to make this a tough world to detect, but that goes to show you: we’re getting really good at this sort of thing.

How long before we find another Earth this way? I’m guessing not very long. A few years at most. If they’re out there, they can’t hide forever.

Locally, NASA Ames is holding the first Kepler conference next week, with more exoplanet discoveries to be discussed. If you’re in the area, try and catch their public talk on Tuesday evening, should be most exciting!

Image: Judy Cebra-Thomas and Scott Gilbert/Swarthmore College/NSF

Newts have the amazing ability to regenerate limbs and more, according to Ed Yong in his Discover blog:

They can regenerate parts of their tails, jaws, ears, hearts, spines, eyes and brains.

Very cool, right? But wait there’s more. A new study, published this week in Nature Communciations finds that the newts can do this at any age and over and over and over again, regenerating the exact same body part.

Researchers from Ohio and Japan removed the eye lenses from six Japanese newts (Cynops pyrrhogaster) a total of 18 times each over a 16-year period. And each time an identical eye lens grew back. In addition, reports New Scientist:

By the end of the study the newts were 30 years old, five years older than their average lifespan in the wild. Even so, the regenerated lenses from the last two excisions were indistinguishable from lenses of 14-year-old adults that had never regenerated a lens.

Could this finding have an impact on human health? Ed Yong is doubtful:

Scientists have studied amphibian regeneration for 200 years, with no discernible impact on medicine yet.

While lizards lack the skills for regeneration, they possess excellent problem–solving abilities, according to a Duke University study published this week.

The researchers used an intelligence test usually reserved for birds. They tested anoles from Puerto Rico (Anolis evermanni) using a wooden block with two wells: one empty and the other holding a worm covered by a cap. Four lizards, two male and two female, passed the test by either biting the cap or bumping it out of the way.

The lizards solved the problem in three fewer attempts than birds need to flip the correct cap and pass the test—birds usually get up to six chances a day, but lizards only get one chance per day because they eat less. In other words, if a lizard makes a mistake, it has to remember how to correct it for a full 24 hours. The results were published online in Biology Letters.

This is not the first study demonstrating lizards’ braininess, writes Science News:

[Georgia State’s Walter] Wilczynski’s lab has demonstrated that whiptail lizards can learn and unlearn tasks, and researchers led by Gordon Burghardt of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have described monitor lizards learning how to get food out of a lab device…

Lizards indeed deserve more respect, says Wilczynski…

Indeed they do.

Image: Manuel Leal/Duke University

August 27^th – Big Mars Day

Despite what you may have heard, or read, Mars will not be bigger than the Moon in the sky tonight. It hasn’t ever been, nor will it ever be. In fact, tonight Mars will be about as far as it can get from Earth—195 million miles away.

It all started on August, 27, 2003 when Mars was very close, about 34 million miles from us, the closest in 60,000 years. But even then, it was still smaller than the Moon. From NASA:

At the height of the display, Mars was about 75 times smaller than the full Moon.

That’s when “the virus” was born.

Someone, somewhere, reasoned as follows: If Mars is 75 times smaller than the Moon, then magnifying it 75 times should make it equal to the Moon… “At a modest 75 times magnification,” the [email] message stated, “Mars will look as big as the full Moon to the naked eye.”

The email was altered and forwarded and continues to surface every August 27^th. Will the hoax ever die? From Universe Today:

I wasn’t going to write an article about the Mars-Moon Hoax this year because I thought it was too passé, but I just looked at some stats and saw that our article on the topic from 2007, “Will Mars Look as Big as the Full Moon On August 27? Nope” has gotten over 50,000 hits the past few days…

Big Solar

Wednesday, the California Energy Commission approved the Beacon Solar Energy Project, which would be “the largest solar power plant in the world” [New York Times]. It will be built on the edge of the Mojave Desert, covering over 2,000 acres, and when it’s operational– hopefully by the end of next year– it should be producing 250 megawatts of energy.

This isn’t your standard solar, according to “80beats” in Discover:

Beacon is solar thermal: Rather than converting sunlight to electricity through photovoltaic cells, solar thermal projects use mirrors to concentrate the heat of the sun, creating steam to turn turbines.

As we wrote Tuesday, Go, Solar!

Caterpillar Munching Trouble and Lizard Live Births

We’re running out of room, but we can’t leave out these two awesome evolution stories!

An article published in Science today describes tobacco plants that have evolved to release chemicals when caterpillars chew on the leaves. The chemicals call out to caterpillar predators. Booby-trapped! Read more in New Scientist.

Also reported in New Scientist: Skinks, a type of lizard, are in the middle of evolving from egg laying to live births. Check it out!

How do new species develop? Well, in many cases, it takes the geographic separation of a population to get that process started. However, researchers out of UC Santa Cruz studying colorful and charismatic lizards have been working to confirm an alternative hypothesis that’s existed since Darwin that a population containing different morphs– different types of the same species can, over time, yield new species.

Scientists in Barry Sinervo’s Lab have been studying the side-blotched lizard for over 20 years. Within this species there are three distinct color morphs– orange-throated, blue-throated and yellow-throated lizards.

A few years ago, Dr. Sinervo and his team discovered that competition among male side-blotched lizards for territory and mates takes the form of a rock-paper-scissors game, where the aggressive orange-throated lizard can take the territory from a blue-throated; the blue-throated can work in teams to defend against the yellow-throated; and the non-territory holding yellow-throated can mimic females in order to sneak onto the territory of an orange-throated and mate with females there.

Side-blotched lizards live in the western and southwestern United States and into Mexico. In some areas, all three morphs live side-by-side, but in others, one or two of the morphs are missing. As published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it’s in these areas that two things are happening which may be leading to the evolution of new species.

One: There are populations where one or two of the morphs have been lost, leaving just a single-colored morph. As that morph takes over, adaptations that were beneficial before become unnecessary, leading to evolutionary change and new adaptations emerging.

Two: Evidence of this evolutionary change is supported by the fact that a new subspecies of side-blotched lizards have been identified in populations where one or two of the three morphs have been lost. This is significant since subspecies are the precursors to new species.

DNA testing supports the idea that cycling between color morphs has been happening within some populations of side-blotched lizards for many millions of years. The research here suggests that, in some cases, this cycling may eventually result in the loss of one or two morphs which, in turn, could lead to the evolution of new species. But that probably won’t happen until further down the road. Remember, evolution can be a very slow process.

Image from LizardLand!