So, recently my days have consisted of poking trees with a broomstick in search of lizards. In case that sounds glamorous let me dissuade you, it’s actually been a ton of work and for the most part the lizards are little flashes of four legs and a tail. Chasing them down to sex them just from sight has been really tough, but we’re starting to get the hang of it. I owe so much to these two field assistants Mahmood (on the ladder) and Elcanna.
With luck I’ll be finished sampling all 1031 trees tomorrow! I’ve found 484 geckos so far! I bet that’ll be over 500 before I’m done! Most occupied trees only have one or two lizards. The really exciting ones though have 6 or 10! Keeping track of all of those lizards running around has been a trick but it’s fun to see a tree teeming like that. We’ll see if my hypotheses are actually correct… I haven’t started really sorting through my data yet but right now I’m just happy to be finding this many lizards.
Colin Donihue 