A Brief History of Anole Annals

Anole Annals has undergone some big changes in the past year. We rolled out a new look and are working on adding new functionality to the site, including a meet the scientists page. As the anole community grows, we’re finding it harder and harder to keep up! 

Anole Annals started out in 2011, or so the founders’ imperfect memories recalled. Jonathan Losos and Rich Glor combined their talents to launch the site with the goal of being a repository for everything Anolis. With Jonathan’s vision and Rich’s tech savvy, the blog we all now know and love came into being in 2011. Or was it earlier? The earliest post I was able to track down was a charming poem by Yoel Stuart in 2009, at the time a graduate student at Harvard. A strange first post for the blog, and it was followed by a huge 6-month time gap. This led me to suspect that perhaps some early posts of Anole Annals were lost at some point. Yet it seems, however strange of a start, that this was in fact the first Anole Annals post published on November 21, 2009, as this blog post marking Anole Annals’ 2nd Birthday notes. And if you dig into the comments of that early post, you’ll also find the explanation for that odd early gap. From Rich: “Its worth pointing out that the first two posts to Anole Annals – one published in November 2009 and the second in May of 2010 – are outliers because the blog didn’t really get rolling with daily or near daily posts until late in October of 2010. All the more impressive that we’ve already racked up 369 posts!”. Now, 9 years later, I asked Jonathan and Rich if they could shed some more light on these early days of Anole Annals.

Jonathan told me that his vision for the blog all those years ago was to be a “clearinghouse of information” for anoles — a place where researchers and the public alike could read about new papers, ideas, and observations of anoles. Initially, Jonathan started out with the lofty goal of publishing a post a day, which he carried on for quite awhile (writing many of the posts himself, a huge amount of work!). As the blog grew, Jonathan and Rich recruited graduate students and other anole researchers to write posts. At one point in these early days, the Losos Lab and the Glor lab agreed to have a friendly post-writing competition to see which lab could produce the most content for the blog over the course of a semester. The Glor Lab won, although rumors of “dubious ethical content” abound. In the years since, we’ve seen some amazing breakthroughs shared on the blog. Jonathan’s favorite?  A Cuban tree frog that ate and then regurgitated a green anole that went on to live for several years (affectionately named “Gordon”).

Rich remembers things slightly differently. He noted that he handled the technical aspects of the blog and built the first site while Jonathan was the visionary behind it. The rest of his comments are a little more contentious, so I’ll let him speak for himself. He approved posting his comments verbatim, noting that “Fact-checking probably isn’t necessary.” Here’s Rich’s accounting of the early days of Anole Annals: “My lab and I were also responsible for most of the early posts, and all of the really good posts. Jonathan’s lab was busy trying to have some kind of competition, but we were just doing our thing and making tons of posts. This was also during the period when Jonathan’s Lab was exploring his longstanding belief that creatures like bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and unicorns were real, so they weren’t really doing any anole work at the time. They got so desperate that some of their posts were just sarcastic responses to our informative posts. Those were some dark days for the Losos Lab, but I’m glad they made it through the struggles.”

I suspect the truth may be some middle ground between these two stories. Perhaps the early contributors of the blog can fill in some of the details.

Since 2011, or 2009 (or whenever), the blog has grown to 2,605 published posts, 334 contributing authors, and 5,553 subscribers! Our all time view count is 1,840,029, which is probably underestimated because of several hosting switches over the years (some counters we have accessed on older versions of the site suggest the true number is closer to 2.5 million!). On our best day we reached 3,209 views, and the most popular post with 2,690 views on that day? None other than the viral-news anole from last year, Anolis aquaticus, the lizard that breathes underwater. Another top performer? Our series digging into the proposal to split Anolis into 8 genera, which inspired quite the debate here (check out: time to discuss, should it stay or should it go?, the case for splitting, the use of Anolis by the numbers, and a historical perspective). Of course, we’ve covered the new research presented at annual conferences like Evolution, SICB, and JMIH since the start. But we’ve also had some fun. In 2011 we had a poetry contest with some pretty amazing contributions. In 2011 we also launched our first photo contest, which turned into the annual calendar contest starting in 2012 (have you seen the amazing 2020 calendar?!). And then there was that time in 2016 when Martha Muñoz and Pavitra Muralidhar humored me by co-hosting the first (and only to date) Anole March Madness (I personally think we should bring this back). What’s your favorite memory from Anole Annals? Do you remember the early days? Tell us about it in the comments!

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