ASSESSING THE EFFECTS OF GENETIC DIVERGENCE AND MORPHOLOGY ON ANOLIS LIZARD MATING

The brown anole (Anolis sagrei) is a widespread neotropical lizard found on many islands in the West Indies as well as the coast of Central America. Across their range, brown anole populations show extensive ecomorphological trait variation and substantial genetic divergence. It is unclear, however, whether this genetic and morphological divergence is indicative of reproductive isolation between populations. We investigated variation in mating behavior across populations by analyzing 4 h of video for each of 234 captive male-female pairs encompassing all 36 possible pairings from six sampled islands. For each pair of individuals, we tested for an association between the occurrence of mating, morphological traits, and genetic relatedness of their populations. We found no support for the hypotheses of ecological divergence, nonecological divergence, or both ecological and nonecological divergence driving premating reproductive isolation in A. sagrei. We did find that males with relatively short heads tend to mate more quickly and hypothesize potential explanations that warrant future investigation.