Projet PODARCIS vit toujours ! (Project PODARCIS lives!)

Even though I’ve been gone from France for almost 4 months now, I’m glad to say that Project PODARCIS is alive and well.

Last Saturday, four students from here at Ohio Wesleyan University and I traveled to Athens, OH to attend the 9th annual Herpetology Symposium organized by graduate students from Ohio University and John Carroll University. It was a fantastic day, offering the perfect combination of a relaxed and supportive atmosphere with presentations of really great science. It was also my first opportunity to bring students myself to such a meeting, which was great fun. Despite having to get up and leave well before the break of dawn, they did a great job participating and meeting new people. At the end of the long day, I told them that at the meeting next year they would be presenting! So we’ve got some research to get going this spring.

From left: Wyatt McQueen, me, Princeton Vaugh, Kate Falko, & Allison Johnson representing OWU at the herp meeting! (Photo thanks to Don Miles)

I was very happy to see Jeanine Refsnider from the University of Toledo (with whom I overlapped in grad school at Iowa State for a year) as the keynote speaker. She gave a great talk describing her very cool research investigating various aspects of anthropogenic effects on amphibians and reptiles. Don Miles from Ohio University, who spends a great deal of time at the SETE du CNRS, also gave a most interesting talk linking ecomorphological traits in lizards to risks of becoming endangered, a connection I had never made before. For my part, I gave a talk titled, “Lizards on the Peak: Physiological responses to high-altitude hypoxia in an upward-colonizing lizard” summarizing the last two experiments I did in France (with Brooke in the fall of 2018 and with Team TOPS last spring). I left feeling energized after many inspiring conversations and presentations.

Title slide from my talk -- my first representing OWU!

We also got some great news this past week: Fabien received a grant from INTERREG POCTEFA: Programme Opérationel de Coopération Transfrontalière Espagne-France-Andorre, in cooperation with the Observatoire Pyrénéen du Changement Climatique (Pyrenean Climate Change Observatory; OPCC), which will allow us to continue our lizard work for the next two years. So I’ll be back in France for summer 2020! This work will focus on two primary aspects of lizard response to climate change in the Pyrenees. First, we’ll be conducting some of the measures of thermal physiology on the high-elevation specialist Iberolacerta lizards as we did in the past with Podarcis. Quantifying the physiology in these lizards will provide insight into the mechanisms that allow them to live remarkably high in the mountains. Further, comparing the thermal traits among the Iberolacerta species and Podarcis, we can better understand how they might interact in the future if Podarcis does keep moving up the mountains. Second, we will collect intensive field data on body temperatures and activity patterns in Podarcis at sites across an elevational gradient using thermal imaging. In conjunction with the data from our lab experiments, these behavioral data will provide a solid foundation for predicting responses to climate change.

An example of a thermal image of a lizard near a rock wall. The color in the image corresponds to temperature, so you can see this little guy is much cooler than the ground.

And finally, in a couple weeks, I’ll be giving a seminar here as part of OWU’s Science Lecture Series. The talk will focus on the PODARCIS work in France, hopefully with the end result of inspiring some students from here at OWU to head out to the Ariège with me next summer!