We’re wrapping up our sampling of our second field sites. This week we were sampling in the
dry forests outside of the town of Guanica. These sites are at sea-level and so are much drier, scrubbier, and pricklier. The anoles consequently have very different behaviour patterns and we have seen several new species. Frustratingly, the two most common species here look virtually identical unless you have a microscope. This makes identifying the species in the field during our surveys challenging, to say the least. The anoles also are pressed as close to their perch as possible, are often either very close to, or far away from, the ground, and are often various shades and mottling of grey. At our last site, the maximum number of individuals seen in one day was ~100, whereas the maximum here was 11 (the latter were in my plot, I was very pleased).
When surveying a plot, we walk in a spiral motion from the outside to the central tree. The idea is to look at every single tree and twig and branch from every angle, so it is a slow and methodical (dare I say meditative?) process. Day surveys (starting at 10am) take usually between 3-4 hours while night surveys (starting at 8pm) usually take less time, although our minimum sampling time is 2hrs. So if you finish early, keep on looking! Once we see a lizard we look at it with binocs to identify species and see if it has been previously painted, take a photograph of it (used to confirm our species IDs), paint it with new paint, and then write down information about perch height, diameter, temperature, sex, and species.
It’s been a full and very, very busy week. We survey plots for three days in a row, two surveys per
day. There are between 4 and 6 plots, and we rotate through, so everyone surveys two of the three days. Other members of the team do insect sampling and lizard collecting, which we keep in a bag until they poop so we can collect information on diet (and then we release the lizards).
Other than the anoles, natural history highlights include the iguanas,
Puerto Rican screech owls (which make very, very creepy noises at night), land crabs, blue-tailed ameiva (a different genus of lizard), and scorpions. And while others have seen tarantulas, I am very carefully pretending spiders don’t exist as I wade through the dense brush of the forests.
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