Looking for Lizards, Searching for Sceloporus
I’ve mentioned before that we use a method called “radio telemetry” to track the fence lizards in our study. For info about how that method works, I refer you to what I’ve written in the Methods section of the project page. In this lab note, I just want to sing praises for the method and demonstrate how it helps us track small, 6-cm-long lizards through a large swath of national forest.
Without those tiny little transmitters and our receiver & antenna setup made by the great people at Wildlife Materials, we would not be able to track fence lizards for weeks at a time, let alone find their nest sites. Trying to repeatedly locate a specific lizard in the forest, to be horribly cliché, is more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack. Unlike our lizards, the proverbial needle doesn’t run from you, mix it up with other needles, decide to burrow under the haystack, move to other haystacks, or climb to the top of the barn!
To show you just what I mean, we’re going to play a quick "Where's Waldo"-esque game. In the picture below, see if you can spot the fence lizard.
Here, I’ll give you some help.
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See it, yet? Let’s walk a little closer.
Here’s another hint.
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Still not sure (or maybe you are)? Let’s walk even closer.
See her now?
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There she is! And that’s just one lizard from a starting point of about 10 meters (~32.8 feet) away. We track fence lizards across a patch of forest that is about 5 square kilometers (~1.93 square miles) at all hours of the day and night!
As much as I do love hiking around looking for lizards, I couldn’t do the tracking needed for this project without my handy radio telemetry equipment. Especially not when they are so good at being well hidden and well camouflaged, like in the pictures below.
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