Recently my work on urban lizard locomotor performance was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This manuscript is part of a special issue on urban evolution, “The Evolution of City Life”, which will be coming out in paper form any day now. Looking for the videos? JUMP straight to them at the bottom … Continue reading
In case you missed it, my paper on phenotypic shifts in urban populations of Anolis cristatellus is the cover story for this month’s edition of the journal Evolution (May 2016). The issue is online here if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I discussed briefly the findings in a previous post on this site, … Continue reading
I’m a little late on announcing this since I have been in the field in Puerto Rico for the past week, but I’m extremely excited to announce that our manuscript on urban adaptation in Anolis cristatellus is now online as accepted in the journal Evolution! This paper is the culmination of the first 3 years … Continue reading
Following up on my previous post about our work on caudal autotomy, I’m happy to share that our paper from undergraduate Kirsten Tyler’s senior honor’s thesis is out now (online) in Journal of Herpetology Kirsten analyzed the hundreds of X-rays I’ve taken of urban and natural anoles across Puerto Rico and found consistently higher frequency of … Continue reading
Five years after completing my masters at Columbia University with C.U. adjunct James Gibbs (SUNY ESF), my turtle research finally sees the light of day. “Golf courses as habitat for aquatic turtles in urbanized landscapes”, in press at Landscape and Urban Planning, was my first introduction into urban ecology. I started this project thinking that I … Continue reading
Kirsten Tyler, a (recently graduated) undergraduate from UMass Boston, has spent the past few months working to better understand patterns of tail autotomy in urban populations of Anolis cristatellus (along with me and Liam Revell). We wanted to know if tail autotomy frequency differed between the urban and natural sites I have sampled over the past 3 … Continue reading
Urbanization poses a major challenge for many species, altering habitat in ways that few animals can tolerate. Despite this, some animals persist and even thrive in urban areas. In my research in the Revell lab at UMass Boston I’ve been studying adaptation in response to urbanization in Anolis cristatellus, the Puerto Rican Crested Anole. But persistence in … Continue reading
We have successfully made it through 4 days of habitat sampling and are only a little short of our goals on the timeline because of a massive rain storm that rolled through Mayaguez around 5pm yesterday. So far we have completed the habitat availability sampling at both sites and have collected habitat use data in … Continue reading
Adaptability 