Posted inScience / ToMl

Florida Lizards Evolve Stickier Feet in Just 15 Years

If you’re a green anole living on an island in Florida and your turf is invaded by a brown anole that puts you and your food supply at risk, what do you do? You adapt — with mind-boggling evolutionary speed, apparently.

That’s according to new research by a team of scientists that documented the green anole on islands in Florida making key changes to itself in as little as 15 years and 20 generations.

On initial contact with the invasive brown lizard, the home-team green lizards quickly began to perch themselves higher in trees. As generations passed, their feet evolved — they grew bigger toe pads and supplied themselves with stickier scales. These changes meant the lizards were better able to grip smoother branches found higher in the trees.

Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Integrative Biology at The University of Texas at Austin, compared the lizards’ feat to what would be an equally remarkable change in humans. “If human height were evolving as fast as these lizards’ toes, the height of an average American man would increase from about 5 foot 9 inches today to about 6 foot 4 inches within 20 generations — an increase that would make the average U.S. male the height of an NBA shooting guard.”

Green, or Carolina anoles are abundant lizards in the southeastern United States, while the brown, or Cuban anoles first made their appearance in south Florida in the 1950s. It’s unclear how the brown anoles made it to the U.S., but it’s speculated that they got here as stowaways on ships carrying agricultural goods from Cuba.

The researchers suspect competition for food and living space is driving the rapid changes. Said competition can even turn gruesome. Stuart said adults of both brown and green lizards have been known to eat the newborn hatchlings of the other species, making a move to the high trees all the more pressing a need. “Maybe if you have bigger toe pads, you’ll do that better than if you don’t,” he said.

Stuart and his co-authors have published their findings in the latest issue of the journal Science.

— source discovery.com

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