Phew. One week of field work in the Dominican Republic and it feels like I’ve been here much longer. This is partially due to the intense nature of (all) fieldwork. Our study system is a long way from where I live and so this means that we try and maximize our efforts when we do make it out to see the lizards.
The first couple of days were spent traveling from the airport (Punta Cana, eastern tip of the island) to our first field sites near Oviedo (small town, as far south as you can go). These days were spent buying gear, like a camping stove, propane, and water jugs, while also navigating the Santo Domingo traffic and the various roads leading us to Oviedo. Intersections in Santo Domingo can be best thought of according to flow dynamics—where there is a steady stream of movement across many directions with scooters and motorcycles dodging and weaving around the cars and trucks.
The sites we were scouting outside of Oviedo, in Jaragau National Park, are coastal dry forests. These forests were hot and dry—although it rained on us twice—which apparently never happens. The rain also brings out the large red centipedes, which have beaten out spiders as my least favourite creepy-crawly.
For this trip we are scouting sites for the extended summer field work, which means at each site we are inventorying which species of Anole are found. To do this, we spend hours meandering slowly through the forests looking for lizards and catching them using a modified pan fishing rod with a noose attached to the end. Since the lizards are so light, the nooses do not hurt them.
Once we have caught the lizard, we take data on where they were perched (eg how high off the ground, the temperature of what they are sitting on), pop them into a cotton bag, and then bring them back to where we are staying. We then wait for the lizards to poop, collect the poop, and then release the individuals back to where we found them. This process usually takes 36 hours.
The second goal of this trip is to identify survey locations for the summer trip and to set up the survey plots. This involved flagging a circle that is 15m radius, calculating canopy and understory density, and using augmented reality technology to scan the environment to build a virtual map of the ground and understory vegetation. This last bit, while cool, always makes me feel like I’m helping the machines to vanquish humanity.
In the three days in this area, we saw more species of Anolis than exist on the entire island of Puerto Rico. It was a whirlwind of orienting to the different species, while also startling the endemic vine snakes and burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia) during our night surveys.
From Oviedo, we drove up into the mountains to about 1400 meters in the Parque Nacional Sierra de Bahoruco. Up at this elevation, the dry scrub forests and cacti transitioned to pine forests and fire burned clearings dotted with wild yucca, blackberry brambles, wild strawberries, and other prickly bushes. If I hadn’t known I was in the DR, I would have thought I was in any post-disturbance forest in British Columbia. We were camping at this site and were greeted by a flock of parrots (Amazonia ventralis) and nesting parakeets (Aratinga chloroptera). There are also birds with a two-toned call (Euphonia musica and Myadestes genibarbis) as well as trogons (Prioteus roseigaster).
To top it off, the anole diversity in the pine forests blew us away. There was a completely new set of species to learn and this site hit my bucket list of cool anole species I wanted to see—luckily these ones are also pretty easy to identify.
Following a trail off the ridge where we camped and into a ravine, the forest
abruptly transitioned into a broadleaf deciduous forest filled with what I think of as alder analogues. Again the anole species in the damper, warmer broadleaf forest was
different than in the pine forests—perfect for our work as we get to survey a broad array of habitat-types!
The ecology behind what maintains these forest-types is super interesting as well. The pine forests are normally a high elevation ecosystem, but pines are tolerant to fire, so they establish along drier ridges where a fire will establish better than in the damp ravines. This allows pine forests to establish in high disturbance regions leaving remnant broadleaf forests in the damper areas where it is more challenging for the fire to spread. These forest are mainly human caused either due to burning for clearing or from cigarettes. For more information on this, check out the work by Patrick Martin.
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