The anole questions everyone asks.

No. Chameleons are an Old World family with gripping feet and turret eyes. Anoles are New World lizards related to iguanas. The Green Anole does change color, which is where the old nickname came from, but it shifts between green and brown with temperature and mood rather than copying its background.

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Cold, stress, a fight, a bad night's sleep: Green Anoles go brown for all of these and turn green again when they warm up and settle. A lizard that is brown every time you look, has a stripe or diamond pattern down its back and never shows green is a Brown Anole, a different species.

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Males have the big dewlap (throat fan) and show it off; females have at most a small one. Male Brown Anoles can raise a ridge along the back; females and young have a pale wavy stripe there. Female Green Anoles often carry a plain pale line down the spine. Males of both grow larger and have a swollen tail base.

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On the US mainland only the Green Anole is native. Every other anole you meet, from the Brown Anole to the Knight Anole, arrived with trade and planting and has settled in. We say introduced or nonnative rather than a harsher label, because whether a settled species is a problem is a separate, human judgment.

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The dewlap is a signal flag. Males flash it to claim a perch, warn off rivals and court females, usually with head bobs and push-ups in a rhythm that is particular to each species. Its color is often the fastest way to tell species apart.

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Yes, mostly. Anoles drop the tail to escape, and a new one grows over a few months, usually shorter, stiffer and a different color. It never regrows a second time from the same break.

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They do fine on their own. The best help is leaving leaf litter, shrubs and insects in place and skipping broad-spectrum pesticides.

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Ten species live on the main island, and they share the forest by living in different places: high in the canopy, on the upper trunk, low on the trunk near the ground, out on thin twigs, or down in the grass. Each of these lifestyles comes with its own body type, from big-headed canopy giants to slim, long-tailed grass anoles. Biologists call these types ecomorphs, and Puerto Rico has five of the six; only the trunk anole is missing.

Much the same set of types evolved separately on Cuba, Hispaniola and Jamaica. A grass anole in Puerto Rico looks and lives like a grass anole in Cuba, but its closest relatives are other Puerto Rican anoles. That repeat performance is why Caribbean anoles are a textbook example of evolution.

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Probably. It is known from eight museum specimens from Culebra, Vieques, Tortola and St. John, and none has been collected since 1932. Long searches, including about 1,500 hours on Culebra, have found nothing, and reported sightings have turned out to be young Green Iguanas. It is still listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and as Critically Endangered (possibly extinct) by the IUCN, so a confirmed find would be big news. No photograph of a living one is known.

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St. Croix is not part of the Puerto Rico Bank, the shallow shelf that joined Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, St. John and the British Virgin Islands when sea levels were lower, and its anoles are different. The one you will see there is the Saint Croix Anole, which lives nowhere else. The Puerto Rican Bush Anole and the Banded Anole do not live on St. Croix, and the Crested Anole has been recorded there only a couple of times.

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Each island has a single anole, a close relative of the Crested Anole. In 1976 the herpetologist Harold Heatwole suggested that their ancestors drifted over from southwestern Puerto Rico on floating debris, back when that coast reached farther into the Mona Passage, and then changed on their own once the islands were cut off. Both have the plain yellow-orange dewlap that Crested Anoles on Puerto Rico's dry south coast have too.

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