I ID’d a Brown Anole that was observed in Ontario; not a place that you would expect a tropical lizard. The observation came up as Casual after my ID, and took a couple of page refreshes before it showed that it had been marked as Not Wild. I didn’t see any indication that this one was a pet, or otherwise not wild; only that it had been scooped up and temporarily corralled for the photo.
What I’m wondering is what would make this one any different from the various RG anole observations from Canada? I know that these are probably accidental introductions; it’s not as if they’re likely to establish a breeding population. They’re where they are by human agency, but not by human intention; kind of like a volunteer seedling of something that pops up in the pot next to your carefully nurturted tomato. I usually leave those marked as wild.
Do observations such as this one fall into a gray area that I don’t know about? I didn’t want to do anything with the DQA until I got a better idea of what iNat’s policy is with regards to things like this.
If you don’t think it’s established, and perhaps it hitchhiked in a suitcase or something, you can annotate it as “No” for “Established”.
If you think the location’s wrong, you can vote “no” for “Location is accurate”, but you may want to ask the observer first to see if they made a mistake.
I grew up in Southern Ontario, and my initial reaction was that the “critical thermal minimum” for Brown Anoles is too high for them to establish a breeding population in Ontario. But looking at the range map on iNat, there are a suspicious number of orange dots going up the Eastern Seaboard, including into Southern Ontario.
Things like that are constantly being introduced to places. Are they breeding? Established. If not, then it’s just part of that constant onslaught of migrants.
Anoles regularly get transported on tropical plants grown in Florida to all over North America. Unless they end up inside a greenhouse that has lots of bugs, they can’t survive the winter in Canada. From what I can tell from clicking on random observations, their northern extent is probably somewhere around the North Carolina/Virginia border since most observations north of there have discussions about provenance. There have been lots of discussions about whether they count as wild or not and consensus is to call them wild.
For interest’s sake, in birding rules if it travelled from a wild population without intentional human help then an anole in Ontario would “count”, but an escaped pet would not. By iNat rules both are “countable”.
If it was just found loose and not kept as a pet, it counts as wild under iNat’s definition, even if it only got there by hitchhiking. The “not wild” flag gets applied inconsistently — some people mark anything out-of-range as captive, others don’t.
