
After Last Year's Hurricanes Caribbean Lizards Are Better at Holding on for Life - curtis
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/hurricanes-irma-maria-lizard-grip/566006/?single_page=true
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timerol
The surviving lizards are the ones who are capable of holding on through
hurricanes. The title almost implies that the lizards as a whole trained to
get better at holding on. The article explains it well:

"He found that, on average, the post-hurricane lizards had toe pads that were
6 to 9 percent bigger than those of pre-hurricane individuals, and front legs
that were 2 percent longer. This wasn’t because the bodies of specific lizards
had changed; there’s no evidence that the toes of adult anoles can grow by
that amount. Instead, the storms had simply wiped out all the lizards with
small toe pads. By selecting for individuals that were better at clinging to
surfaces—and presumably at withstanding high winds—the storms had changed the
average proportions of the population."

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LeifCarrotson
The title is how a lot of people understand evolution, though. As if the
lizard's genes or evolution itself has intent and makes decisions based on
stresses. This misunderstanding often involves a misunderstanding of
epigenetics, as if an organism can concentrate really hard and change its
genes (insert X-men movie special effect with the camera zooming in to the
sub-cellular level and seeing helices go from blue to red) and produce larger
toe pads.

Selection is an unfortunately overused euphemism for death.

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thaumasiotes
> Selection is an unfortunately overused euphemism for death.

Sure, as long as you consider "failure to reproduce" or "managing to
reproduce, but not at a very high rate" to be synonyms for "death".

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1996
These lizards are amazing. They can also jump over large distances relative to
their size.

I wonder if the improved toe pads will impact their jumping abilities?

Changes to the tail are known to impact them:
[http://www.anoleannals.org/2012/09/15/jumping-without-the-
ta...](http://www.anoleannals.org/2012/09/15/jumping-without-the-tail-is-bad-
for-an-anole-and-it-might-not-get-better/)

They are slightly impacted by large meals:
[http://jeb.biologists.org/content/214/12/2073](http://jeb.biologists.org/content/214/12/2073)

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xbmcuser
So evolution at work as hurricanes become more frequent lizards will get
bigger toe pads. It would be interesting to see 10-20 years from now how large
the toe pads grow on average with smaller toe pad lizard dying out.

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jmts
This article seems to confuse 'selection' for 'evolution'.

These lizards haven't evolved - their genes are unchanged. It is their
population that has been selected against for new pressures. This will
potentially drive evolution genetically, however on such a short time scale
there has been no evolution yet.

I guess you could argue that evolution describes the state of the current gene
pool, however I'm not sure that is a particularly common measure.

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dsfyu404ed
As someone who's worked on both the academic side and in the various support
services of a couple universities the highlight of this article was imagining
how the process of getting a large leaf blower went down.

