As I alluded to in a previous post, we had to catch a lot of lizards from these sites! We needed at least 80 A. sagrei from Andros and we were also on the lookout for any other anole species we could find. Much like my lizards in Greece, we used long fishing poles with a little loop at … More Catching Anoles
Well, the Thanksgiving holidays got the better of me and I didn’t get the next post up as quickly as I was hoping. However, now that cold weather has really settled in in New England, another few photos from warmer climes are a welcome distraction. As I introduced last post, I just spent a week … More So what were we up to in the Bahamas?
I’ve spent the last two months working in a new desk (and new zip code) and have yet to update you all. Sorry! Surprise, I’m spending this year in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, working with Dr. Jonathan Losos. The goal is to think more about evolution in my Greek lizards. As you … More Lizards at Harvard
A critical component of this study is being able to keep track of who is who, every single year. There are a lot of tried and true methods for doing so, including the low-tech of removing the last joint of different combinations of toes. There’s the mid-tech: injecting multi-colored liquid plastic that congeals just under the skin to give … More PIT Tagging Lizards
After several “are you still alive?” emails yesterday I think it’s time to update the blog! I’m sorry for the delay, but it was for good reason: this last week has been non-stop revisiting of the five introduction islands from last year. I’m going to stretch this out over several posts because it was a lot of work and the … More The islands revisited
A few posts ago I talked about the tough time I was having taking a picture of the undersides of these little lizards. Well, I have a new solution that seems to be working great! Credit goes to Dr. Herrel in Paris. My printer has a built in flat-bed scanner. Lizard, scanner – put the two together, … More Scanning lizards
So I gave you the end of the story first with that last post. Now that we have the local permissions and federal permits in hand, and the experiment started, I want to tell you a bit about what all went into deciding just how to set up this experiment. It was a long process! This’ll take … More So how’d you pick the islands?
The crowdfunding campaign on http://www.experiment.com is going great! First and foremost, thank you to all of the backers for your support and generosity. With your help, we hit my $3,385 goal and fulfilled my $15,385 minimum budget to make this experiment happen! I am thrilled at the chance, and so excited to have you all on … More First Crowdfunding Goal Reached!
There’s a whole lot of valuable information to be learned from a lizard’s diet – whether it’s a picky eater or a generalist, whether it’s eating pests, or plants, or even other lizards. The list goes on and on. So much of a lizard’s role in an ecosystem is wrapped up in who it eats, … More Stomach flushing lizards
There are lots of ways to catch a lizard. The low-tech solution of course is the old ‘lift a rock and smash your hand down on anything that moves’ method. I tend to prefer more delicate techniques though, particularly in deference to the vipers that also make their homes under these rocks. So if it’s … More Fishing for lizards
Colin Donihue 