The Trials and Tribulations of a Herpetologist Part III

So here it is, the wrap up of my adventures in the desert. At last the time is here and you have -hopefully- read the background story so this makes some sense.

The Trials and Tribulations of a Herpetologist Part I
The Trials and Tribulations of a Herpetologist Part II

If you haven't read these posts...you'll probably be fine anyway. And so, on to the skinning of rabbits...for science.

Near the end of the study my group had been radio tracking lizards for a few weeks, but the thing about this kind of radio tracking is that there is no computer that tells us where exactly this lizard has been, we can only find the lizard a few times a day and record where is was, we have no idea what it was doing the rest of that day. So to solve this problem scientists have come up with a method called "powder tracking." The concept behind this is to first glue fur to the stomach of a lizard, then fill the fur with ultraviolet fluorescent powder that will glow in ultraviolet light. 

Ultraviolet fluorescent powder

To powder track our lizards we glued rabbit fur to their stomach before they woke up and filled the fur with a certain colored powder and let them be, then we caught them again at midday when they're asleep or hiding because of the heat and fill the fur with a different colored powder. 

Phrynie hiding from the heat of the day in a borrowed burrow. On a rather sad note, this is a little dangerous seeing as the owner of this burrow might be home and none to happy about sharing. One of our powder tracked females was killed by what we believe to be was a young rattlesnake when she ventured into the wrong burrow.

Phrynie all set to be powder tracked.

That night at about 10 or 11, we would venture out with our headlamps and UV lights to find the trail, then we would follow it and mark it with numbered flags, and the change in trail color would let us know what time of day these trails were made. The next morning we could check to see where the lizard went during the day before and what ant nests it visited.

The powder trail the next morning. It seemed so much longer in the dark.
By the way, tromping through the desert at night...absolutely terrifying everything is pitch black and the only way to get back to camp is to follow the light of a single lamp. I had the epiphany that if that lamp went out
we would not be finding our way back until the next morning.  

Apparently my professor has tried different kinds of fur in past years, including fake fur, but rabbit fur worked best, and coincidentally there just happened to be jack rabbits running around all over the place. So after splitting up into groups we were informed that the skinning of a rabbit would be required for my group. 

After letting this sink in we actually got pretty excited, scientists are a strange bunch, and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about how to skin a rabbit. Let me just tell you...it is not as easy as they make it look. There is in fact "more than one way to skin a cat" or a rabbit as the case may be and our way was probably the worst. The circumstances did not help our technique in the least. There always seem to be tons of dead rabbits by the side of the road until you actually need a dead rabbit to be on the side of the road.

Anyway it was a day or so before we were to start powder tracking and we were getting a little nervous about not finding any dead skin-able rabbits. When finally, we were driving back from a dip in one of the hot springs nearby, which were to die for by the way, and found a roadkill rabbit that may or may not have been purposefully killed by my professor, there seems to be some controversy over the issue. 

So my first experience in rabbit skinning was at midnight, half asleep, by the side of the road, in the dark with only dim headlamps and a camera flash to light the way, using plastic bags in place of gloves because we forgot them, and hoping to God that nobody drove passed us and think that we were complete whack jobs that skin roadkill in the middle of the night for no real reason. 

I do have to admit though that I did not do any skinning of my own, we talked a big talk but when it came time to perform all the girls kind of wimped out and made to only guy in the group do it. We used to excuse that he was pre-med so he had to get used to this kind of stuff, but we still felt pretty bad about it when he said that the rabbit was still warm...ugh. All of us are biology majors so we have dissected more than our fair share of dead animals, we're not the most squeamish of people but dead things that are still warm...little iffy about that.

All in all the trip was a great research experience and I got to geek out with other biology freaks.