Meeting Abstract
Urban areas have been increasing across the globe, and this urbanization can have profound effects on wildlife in these areas. Our project focuses the lizard on Anolis cristatellus in Puerto Rico, investigating how they have adapted to urban environments, specifically the shape of their adhesive toe pads (i.e. toe pad width, length, and size of lamellae, etc.). Previous work has found lamellae number and toe pad area differ between males from urban sites vs. natural sites (Winchell et al. 2016). Using previously collected flatbed scans of male Anolis cristatellus from 13 sites, roughly half urban and half natural with 20 individuals per site, I placed landmarks around the fourth toe of the hind limb, with points that also focus on solely the adhesive area of the toe, and lamellae number five through ten, using tpsDig. To analyze our data, we used geomorph and Morpho packages in R. We conducted a principal component analysis to determine which axes explain the most variation in our data and a canonical variant analysis to determine if toe pad shape varied between lizards from urban and natural sites. We found that lamellae size increased in urban areas when compared with natural sites. We also found that changes in toe pad length are more dramatic than changes in toe pad width between the two groups. We expect that urbanization is driving a change towards more adhesive toe pads in anoles as they presumably adapt to using manmade substrates.
