Green Anole

Overview

The green anole is North America's only native anole and the most commonly kept anole species in captivity. Found throughout the American Southeast, it inhabits shrubs, trees, and garden vegetation. Males display an expandable pink throat fan (dewlap) in territorial and courtship displays. While capable of limited color change from vivid green to brown, they are not true chameleons - color change reflects mood and temperature rather than camouflage.

Quick Facts

History

Friedrich Siegmund Voigt gave the species its scientific name in 1832, but its place in science was settled much later. On August 31, 2011 a Broad Institute team with Jessica Alföldi and Federica Di Palma as lead authors published the green anole genome in Nature, the first reptile genome sequenced and assembled: until then the only amniote genomes available came from mammals and three birds. The 1.78 gigabase draft, with roughly 17,472 predicted protein-coding genes, gave researchers a reptile reference point for reading bird and mammal evolution. The anole was chosen because the lizard branch had never been sampled and because anoles carry enough ecological and morphological variety to be interesting without becoming unwieldy.