I work with a team of biologists, and we spend hour after hour, day after day, in the hot and muggy Florida sun, relentlessly hunting down lizards. And why do we do this? We are collecting data to advance our understanding of how the environment influences the lizard populations, which teaches us things about ecology and evolution.

In general, our research starts with a series of very small, man-made islands along a river in Florida. They are small enough that we can capture all the lizards on the island, which means we can track their survival through time, and figure out how many offspring they have. Because these lizards are lousy swimmers, they stay put, and we don’t have to worry about new lizards showing up on the islands.

Learning About Lizard Biology

This system allows us to ask many different questions about lizard biology. For example, lizards usually lay eggs under some loose bark or in some soil and abandon them after laying. Thus, the egg’s temperature is mostly affected by weather, rather than the mother (as in a bird, who sits on her eggs). We are currently looking at how environmental conditions during incubation (like temperature and moisture) affect how the eggs develop, and how well the lizards survive after hatching. 

To do an experiment like this, we breed lizards in the lab, carefully incubate their eggs at different conditions, mark them, and release them onto the islands. Through time we can revisit the islands to check in on the lizards, and see which ones have survived or how fast they have grown. And we can then determine if the incubation conditions have an effect on these things.

In other experiments, we modify the social environment on the islands themselves. For example, we can alter the levels of competition by changing how many total lizards occur on each island. One might expect individual survival would be higher on islands with fewer lizards because there are more available resources (like food and habitat). There might also be fewer lizard fights over these resources.

Interpreting The Data

This gives you a taste of a few of the many projects we are working on. And, we don’t have the answers to all of our questions yet, because the projects are ongoing. After collecting data, we spend months analyzing these results and trying to interpret what they mean for the lizards, and for ecology and evolution as a whole. We write papers and make presentations about this research to other biologists at annual conferences. 

This should give you a glimpse into my life as a biologist. I really love being a biologist, because I have always had a passion for learning about the natural world. Now, that’s what I get to do for a living, and I get to make new knowledge and discoveries and share them with the world.