After Last Year's Hurricanes Caribbean Lizards Are Better at Holding on for Life | Hacker News Reader

After Last Year's Hurricanes Caribbean Lizards Are Better at Holding on for Life

theatlantic.com

23 pointscurtis11 comments

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."

I hope all of the Knight Anoles had small toe pads. They are mean and bitey.

I mean, do we have to state the obvious here? Titles are created to attract readers. We all know this. Obviously lizards don't wake up and organize every morning to engage in crossfit strength training.

I can just picture one lizardbro going: "crossfit?! please! do you even lift bro?"

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.

> 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".

Natural selection is very cruel.

But humans are still dead set on trying to beat it...

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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