Un printemps très chargé ! (A very busy spring!)

Here in the Ariège, spring is in the air! Well, at least on the occasional sunny days the lizards think so. We might get some snow later this week, but still the lizards are finding sunny spots and getting ready to start their busy mating season. Jérémie took some lovely photos of lizards frolicking (and fighting) just last week.

A male wall lizard expresses his early-spring affections.
Photo credit: Jérémie Souchet

A wall lizard enjoys some late-winter sun.
Photo credit: Jérémie Souchet

But the lizards aren’t the only ones who are busy. Here at the station, we have been assiduously planning for our ambitious experiment this spring. Currently we are calibrating and testing our respirometry equipment (a Foxbox from Sable Systems), trying out our new PO₂ meter to measure blood oxygen saturation, and prepping our animal accommodations. For this experiment, we will collect pregnant lizards from populations at high and low altitudes and allow the females to gestate at low elevation (at SETE du CNRS in Moulis) and high elevation (at Pic du Midi). Then, we’ll transplant some eggs from each clutch to the opposite treatment. This will allow us to test for both local adaptation in response to hypoxia (by comparing lizards from high and low elevations) and the relative impacts of hypoxia on different developmental stages (by comparing the babies from the moms kept at high altitude and those brought to high altitude as eggs).

Experimental design for our Spring 2018 experiment.

Additionally, we have some exciting things in the works. I’m very pleased to say that our abstract was accepted for an oral presentation at the upcoming Evolution 2018 meeting in Montpellier! And our first manuscript from PODARCIS, describing our experiment last fall, is under review for publication. And we are also planning our education programs for this spring – we will conduct 3 sessions with students from two local schools to teach a bit about oxygen physiology, climate change, and lizard natural history. I’m pretty excited, and a bit intimidated, for these programs – especially since they’ll be all in French! As spring advances, both the lizards and their researchers prepare for some busy coming months.