Il faut une équipe (It takes a team)

One of the coolest parts of our job as scientists is collaborating with great people…doing interesting, exciting work with interesting and exciting people! I’ve written about this in an earlier post about Team PODARCIS (see the earlier post here) and this week it has become even more apparent how true this is!

What better way to make friends and build a team than by sharing some beer? Here's a shot of me doing just that in Montpellier last week. Photo by Petri Niemelä who is doing some very cool work at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. 

After a very invigorating and fun week in Montpellier for the Evolution 2018 meeting (more on this soon), I’m back in Moulis with an expanded Team PODARCIS. Antonio Cordero from Universität Tübingen has returned to the station, now for the third consecutive summer. This week, he’ll be staging embryos from our experiment this year. When our gravid females laid their eggs, we immediately preserved one egg from each clutch in formalin. Antonio can now dissect these eggs and identify how far along in development they were when the egg was laid. It’s a painstaking process to pull out this tiny embryo (probably about as big as a good-sized grain of rice) and then to examine the limb buds to identify their developmental stage. With these data, we will be able to see whether moms at high-altitudes hang on to their babies for longer before laying eggs, perhaps to buffer them from a potentially challenging environment.

Excerpt from a staging table for lizards from Dufaure & Hubert 1961.
Our lizard eggs were likely oviposited between stages 25-27.

And we have a new team member! I’m very happy to welcome my good friend Brooke Bodensteiner to Moulis. Brooke is currently a PhD student at Virginia Tech University in the lab of Martha Muñoz studying how different lizard species respond to different temperatures. For example, Brooke spent the bulk of this summer in the Dominican Republic measuring the preferred temperatures and temperature tolerances in over 30 species of lizards in the genus Anolis. Together, we’ll be doing something similar with our Podarcis lizards, quantifying these traits from warm and cool habitats at low and high elevation sites. We think it is a very exciting project, and some funding agencies agreed – Brooke received grants to support this work from the Company of Biologists and the Lewis & Clark Fund for Exploration and Field Research. We’re not wasting any time and have already begun assembling our equipment and identifying our lizard populations!

Brooke with one of her Anolis hendersoni lizards in the Dominican Republic earlier this year.

And finally, I have a long-overdue acknowledgement…Laura has completed her Master’s degree! Back in June, she successfully defended her thesis and earned a master’s degree in “Ecologie, Biodiversité, Évolution” from Sorbonne Université in Paris. Congratulations, Laura! Even better (well, for us anyway) is that Laura has stayed on to work with the project and will be here through the end of September. She is currently re-shaping her master’s report about the physiological effects of hypoxia on reproducing female lizards (our experiment from this spring) into a manuscript for submission to a journal. She is also working with us in the field and will be organizing some outreach programs at two local primary schools (École Plein Nature and École primaire publique à Moulis). But that’s not all! Laura will also give an oral presentation at the annual meeting of the Société Herpétologique de France (French Herpetological Society) in October. Her talk is titled “Impact de l’hypoxie sur la gestation et le développement embryonnaire chez les squamates” (“The impact of hypoxia on gestation and embryonic development in squamates”) and will combine results from our experiments this year and similar work done by Jérémie on the snake Natrix maura.

As ever, this promises to be a busy and exciting fall…and I sure couldn’t imagine working with a better group of people.