The Redonda posts have trailed off because I’m neck-deep in prepping for the next two trips this field season. I’ve still got a few more Redonda stories in mind to write up though so I’ll try to get them posted before I leave next week. I have to tell you about the next trips though!
Next Saturday I’m headed to the Bahamas for a quick 2 week and 2 day trip to catch Anolis sagrei, the “festive anole.” This is the last field foray of my first postdoc and the second round of sampling in the Bahamas that I was a part of last fall. You can read the posts Here, here, a little disaster here, and more pretty pictures here.
We’ll be surveying lizards on three islands: Eleuthera, Long Island, and Bimini. In each of those islands we’ll be looking for lizards in two habitats – “primary” undisturbed forest and coastal beach scrub to test for differences in morphology between the populations. We’ll also be taking 360 lizards home with us to breed here in the lizard colony. Whew, sorting out those logistics – permitting, charting flights for the lizards (yes, actually), storing them happily for long periods of time – has been a huge challenge.
To help, I’m going to have 6 people along in the field with me. This is going to be great but means we’ve had to find and sort out 4 train rides, 5 car rentals, and a total of 29 different flights. I’ll be on 8 of those flights over the 16 days! I’ll try to keep posting from the field; you’re going to see some familiar faces. Rob has caught lizards with me in Connecticut before, Geoff was with me in Redonda, and Angus was one of my old field assistants in Greece!
Three days after getting back from the Bahamas I’m hopping on a plane to Greece! Just enough time to do some laundry. Whew!
This Greece trip is another revisit to the island manipulation experiment. The islands are steadily filling up with lizards (I think… Greece did get record snow this year…) and this time around we’ve got a lot of projects going. Anthony and I will be back measuring morphology and bite force, Menelia will be there with her sprint speed setup. Kinsey is back! This time looking at the lizards’ throat color. All in all I’ll have 10 people there running around so, again, coordinating everything has been a huge effort.
I’ll be in Greece until the end of May when I’m headed back to Cambridge for a much quieter summer. Stay tuned for all of the stories from the field!
Colin Donihue 