Rapid evolution of anole lizards.

• Position: Ecological Genomics - Brief article

Off the coast of Florida, dredging material has created a string of tiny islands. On most of the islands, native green anole lizards have made their home. On some of these, invasive brown anoles have moved in as well. Together, the intermingled populations create a natural experiment.

Researchers, including Paul Hohenlohe of the University of Idaho, Moscow, have discovered that the green anoles sharing their islands with invaders evolve to be better suited to life higher in the islands' trees--and fast. "Sometimes we think of evolution as this long-term thing that happens on long-time scales, but really it's an observable thing that happens on human time scales," says Plohenlohe, assistant professor of biological sciences.

Hohenlohe and colleagues from the University of Texas, Austin; Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass...