Crested anole (Anolis cristatellus)

The crested anole was first detected in Miami in the mid-1970s, carried over from Puerto Rico. It looks and behaves so much like the Cuban brown anole that the two are easy to mix up, yet they evolved independently on different islands. That near-match is what makes them so interesting to us. What happens when two species that fill the same role meet for the first time?

Watching two species sort themselves out

We got to see it happen. In late 2017 crested anoles reached Lizard Island, our long-term study site in Miami, where we had already been measuring natural selection on the resident brown anoles for two years. Within four years crested anoles made up 66% of all adult anoles on the island, while brown anoles fell from 75% to 18%.

Across Miami, where the two species live together, crested anoles perch higher and brown anoles move lower and onto the ground, each shifting away from the other. On Lizard Island, selection on brown anoles changed after crested anoles arrived, favoring individuals with relatively longer hind limbs. Taken together, this gave us a rare direct look at character displacement, the process by which competing species evolve apart, as it unfolded. The details are on our Lizard Island page.

Small surprises

Watching one species closely for years turns up oddities. In October 2017 at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden we saw an adult male crested anole, about 6 cm from snout to vent, eating a smaller member of its own species: the first record of cannibalism in crested anoles in Florida.

How to tell it apart

• Adult males often carry a tall crest along the tail, which gives the species its name, though not every male has one.
• A pale ring around the eye and a pale stripe above the front leg; brown anoles have neither.
• Olive-tan to almost black, sometimes with broad bands across the body and tail.
• Females have a single cream-colored stripe down the middle of the back.
• Easily confused with the brown anole, which is about the same size and behaves in similar ways. Shade is a clue: crested anoles stick to shadier spots, brown anoles to open, sunny ones.

Our research on the crested anole

• Observing character displacement from process to pattern in a novel vertebrate community. Nature Communications (2024)
• Anolis cristatellus (Puerto Rican crested anole). Cannibalism. Herpetological Review (2018)
• Histopathology of large epidermal cysts on the invasive Puerto Rican crested anole (Anolis cristatellus) in Miami, Florida USA. Anolis Newsletter VII (2019)
• An extreme cold event leads to community-wide convergence in lower temperature tolerance in a lizard community. Biology Letters (2020)

Identification details follow our field identification guide to the anole lizards of Miami. Spotted one? Photograph it and add it to iNaturalist.