All the Dirt on Gardening

Texas Monthly Green Anoles, once plentiful, are becoming more unusual as they are being pushed out by the invasive species, Brown Anoles.  The Texas Invasives newsleter says Brown Anoles arrived via Cuba and the Bahamas, " Anole expert Yoel Stuart, a Harvard Ph.D. and post-doctoral researcher at UT-Austin, has studied brown and green anoles and their interactions everywhere from Florida—where they first arrived in the U.S. and are now estimated to be that state’s most abundant land vertebrate—to West Texas, where their population growth is partially stymied by desert-like conditions. Stuart believes that the brown variety has been hitching rides in potting soil all these years, first on ships coming in from Cuba and the Bahamas, and now they are fanning out across the South in the back of eighteen-wheelers, their eggs or hatchlings burrowed deep in sacks of dirt." As a result of their transportation system, Brown Anoles were primarily spotted at big box garden centers...