The Trials and Tribulations of a Herpetologist Part II

Read The Trials and Tribulations of a Herpetologist Part I if you haven't already.

Now before you say anything  yes I do realize that I didn't actually answer the question of why we skinned rabbits in the last post even though I said I would...I'm just that mean I guess. Yeah, sorry about that.

On with the story, my group of four people, three girls and one boy, were tasked with the job of working with Phrynies, (nickname for the Phrynosoma Platyrhinos that can be seen on my welcome post) what this entailed was catching them, using the biggest ones for radio tracking,track and document the radio tracked lizards four to five times a day, morning (6-7 o'clock), mid-morning (9-10 o'clock), midday (12-2 o'clock), afternoon (5-7 o'clock), and maybe once more if the lizards hadn't yet settled in for the night.

This horned lizard has a red and yellow radio transmitter glued to her back
that allows researchers to find her and study her movement throughout the day.

Me radio tracking lizards using an antenna.
Ugh...I don't like this picture but it's the only one I can find.  

Try to find the sleeping Phrynie in this picture, look for the red and yellow  transmitter.
Phrynies push dirt and sand onto their backs to camouflage themselves while they sleep.
Unfortunately they do this very well and are terribly hard to see so watching where you step is an import skill,
especially since some of them tend to hide in open areas that we often walk through.  

We also set up video cameras in the morning before they woke up to document emergence time (whenever it gets warm enough for them to move around and become aware). Expressing poop was another job of ours (interesting thing about lizards, they poop compact pellets to conserve water, these pellets are similar to an owl's if you've ever dug through owl pellets, I know I have), this is when you pick up a lizard and push the pellet out of them, probably not very comfortable for them but much easier for us then trying to find pellets on the ground that may not be this particular lizards pellet.

The only interesting thing that happened during the emergence videos.
See my YouTube Channel

Phrynies only eat ants, so for one thing their poop is much nicer to deal with, but it also meant that my group had to put up video cameras up at different kinds of ant nests to track their peak activity times and such, one of the things this information can help us do is to find out if the emergence times of the lizards correlates with ant activity. 

Video taping an ant nest. By the way if you're wondering
who the poor sod was that had to watch and count up all those ants
 from the hours of video we had...yeah that was me.

If you're still wondering about why we needed the poop, it was so that when we got back to the lab we could find out the kind and proportion of ants the lizards were eating. Ants have exoskeletons that don't break down when their insides are digested, this basically means that the number and kind of ants eaten can be determined by counting up and identifying ant heads with a microscope. We had hundreds of pellets...which means days of bending over a microscope identifying tiny ant heads, not my idea of a fun time but it comes with the job. Also, not a good idea to laugh, sign, sneeze, or in fact breath heavily at all when counting ant heads because they are very light and are easily blown away just when you've sorted and counted into the triple digits.

All those little specks...those are ant heads.

Basically it was a lot of work.

I'm evil I know, the rabbits are coming...soon, I promise you.

The Trials and Tribulations of a Herpetologist Part III