Limited Morphological Differences of Brown Anoles (Anolis sagrei) Between their Native Cuban and Invasive Florida Range

Karin Ebey^1,* and Peter A. Scott¹

¹Natural Sciences Collegium, Eckerd College, Saint Petersburg, FL 33711. *Corresponding author.

Southeastern Naturalist, Volume 23, Issue 3 (2024): 282–296

First published early online: 16 July 2024

Abstract
Understanding why some species and not others are successful global invaders is an important question in ecology and evolutionary biology. There is much debate on the role that rapid post-invasion adaptation plays in the success of invasive species. Here, we investigated signals of rapid and broad-scale morphological evolution in Anolis sagrei (Brown Anole) between their invasive and native distributions. Although we found significant differences in a few morphological characters between invasive and native Brown Anoles, the morphological variation present in the species broadly overlapped between both populations and has not significantly changed over the last century. These results suggest the invasive success of Brown Anoles in Florida may not be due to major evolutionary change from their Cuban ancestors.

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