WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

THE SMALL PROPELLER PLANE VIBRATES alarmingly as it takes off from the main airport in the Bahamas. It's carrying unusual cargo: besides the eight human passengers, there's a large white cooler, over three feet long. Inside, in dozens of round plastic deli containers, are 120 live lizards, collected over the previous days on another Bahamian island. They range in size from less than three inches long (the smallest adult females) to over seven inches, including the tail, for the biggest males, and are varying shades of rust, brown, beige, and gray. These are lizards in the Anolis genus--Anolis sagrei, to be exact, also known as brown anoles--and ultimately they're bound for a large, underground room full of specially made acrylic tanks at Harvard University that houses hundreds of other lizards.

One of the goals of that lizard colony--and the reason for expeditions like this one to bring back live anoles--is to quantify an especially tricky aspect of evolutionary biology: How do you determine when two groups of similar animals are becoming separate species?

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