www.seaandlearn.org/news2009.htm -
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Published on: 1/1/2009
Last Visited: 7/3/2009
Susan has cut off this male lizard's toe tip to take a blood sample to test for blood parasites.
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I have spent years trying to get a close-up photo of one of these fast movers and have never really succeeded, so I was surprised to learn that Dr. Susan Perkins and grad student Bryan Falk had no difficulty capturing over 50 of the critters during a two-hour morning hike down the Spring Bay Trail.
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Susan, who has a quick eye, is just as comfortable catching them by hand.
Impressive...not nearly as illusive as I had thought!
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Susan, who is an Associate Curator of Microbial Systematics and Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and Bryan, a PhD student at the Museum's Richard Gilder Graduate School, are continuing work begun on Saba in 1989.
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The previous study carried out by researchers from the University of Vermont (including Susan when she was a PhD student herself) looked specifically at the two parasite species that cause malaria in the anole.
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This new eight-day Saba study by Susan and Bryan is part of a larger Caribbean study to determine what parasites are carried by anoles and whether their parasites are the same species.
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Susan performs the surgery by snipping off the very tip of one toe in order to express blood onto a piece of white filter paper, next to where the lizard's unique number is written.
Each filter paper will hold five-to-seven lizards' unique blood samples.
She said a lizard could grow back its tail, but not its toe.
The missing toe can also serve as a marker…the team will be on the lookout next year to see if any caught lizards are missing toe-tops clipped during the current study.
No harm done, Susan says.
They found two lizards without whole feet or legs and getting along just fine!
Many are missing or have regenerated tails.
The lizard can lose its tail in combat, by trauma, or…by voluntary sacrifice when it tries to foil its predator by dropping its tail to skedaddle out of the way sans tail but with its life, while the predator (Pearly-eyed thrasher, hawks, and the racer snake) toys with the dropped appendage.
Quite a trick of nature!
When Susan has completed her part, she puts the lizard into the black mesh, enclosed bucket full of dried leaves so that the lizards have some protection from one another.
They are territorial, and some of those lost appendages were sacrificed in battles over space and love life.
The scientists will take the bucket back along the same trail they walked over in the morning, and deliver the lizards back where they were collected, with no fatalities.
No lizards are taken back to the Museum laboratory, only the parasites.
Susan says that this year's the anole population seemed to be abundant, but young…perhaps many were harmed by last year's storms.
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