An Environment From Another Era

Lush forests filled with endemic plants cover the slopes of the Rwenzoris. Photo by Manuel Werner / Wikimedia Commons.

In central Africa, shrouded in clouds, lies a bizarre and imperiled environment. The Rwenzori Mountains, also called the Mountains of the Moon, rise over five thousand meters from the heart of Africa. The near-constant rains that saturate the mountains fuel two of Earth’s great rivers, the Nile to the east and the Congo to the west. Many of the plants and animals that live here are found nowhere else. And on their lofty summits, the Rwenzoris harbor some of the world’s only tropical glaciers.

But the Rwenzori Mountains are changing so fast that they may be unrecognizable in our lifetimes. In a rapidly warming climate, their famous rainfall is becoming less predictable. Their glaciers – icecaps perched incongruously on the equator – will likely be gone in 20 years. Meanwhile, these changes are affecting people’s lives in the surrounding communities. Local agriculture is tightly tied to the rains, so the region’s food production is dwindling. And malaria, once absent from the high elevations, is becoming more prevalent in mountain villages as disease-carrying mosquitoes thrive in the mild conditions created by a warmer climate.

The Rwenzori Mountains: Our Plan

Mountaineers scale one of the Rwenzori glaciers. Photo by Alan Dappen.

The Rwenzori Mountains weren’t explored by Europeans until the early 20th century. The Duke of the Abruzzi was the first to climb the Rwenzoris in 1906. He brought with him a team of Italian adventurers that included a young Vittorio Sella, a photographer who became famous for his stunning images of the world’s great mountains. Sella captured beautiful images of the Rwenzoris’ glacier-covered peaks, and these photographs are preserved in museum collections in northern Italy. These historical photos give us an unprecedented opportunity to visualize the impacts of a century of climate change on the Rwenzori glaciers.

Our goal is to climb the Rwenzori Mountains and recreate the images captured by Sella in 1906. More than 80% of the glaciers have disappeared already, and the visual differences will be stark. As we trek to the same vantage points where Sella took his famous photographs at the turn of the last century, we will document the unique inhabitants of the Rwenzoris: the plants, animals and people that are facing an uncertain future.

The Mountains of the Moon: an otherworldly landscape. Photo by Alan Dappen.

When we hear “climate change,” a few familiar stories probably come to mind: Receding ice in the Arctic threatens polar bears. Rising sea levels will force Pacific Islanders to abandon their homes. Alpine environments receive less attention, but face similar challenges. As the climate gets warmer, montane organisms often shift their distributions, moving to higher ground to keep pace with the surrounding climate. But mountains are finite… What will happen when these animals and plants run out of mountain? No one is really sure. But the story of the Rwenzoris doesn’t have to be a story of despair; the local people are resilient, and while there is little hope of saving the Rwenzoris’ glaciers, we think that much of the region’s unique way of life and its endemic biodiversity can be preserved if we all begin making better choices about our use of energy.

Here’s where you can help! We’ve turned to an unconventional funding source to help launch our expedition. We are finalists for a $25,000 “Stay Thirsty Grant” from Dos Equis (yes, the beer company!). The winner of the grant will be determined by an online vote, so we need your votes to make our expedition happen!

Click here to go to the voting page!

You can vote up to once per day through October 30.  Thanks in advance for your support! With any luck, the next time I blog here we will have the funding we need to start planning the expedition! We’ll definitely be sharing our adventures along the way. We think The Most Interesting Man in the World would approve!

Image gallery from our expedition in Spain. Click the image to enter the gallery and see some of our favorite photos.

Earlier this summer, National Geographic Young Explorer Dr. Neil Losin and his colleague Dr. Nate Dappen traveled to the Spanish Mediterranean islands of Ibiza and Formentera to create a book about the endemic Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusensis), the symbol of these islands. Learn more about Neil and Nate’s work at www.daysedgeproductions.com.

My colleague Nate Dappen and I have been back home for nearly two months now, but we’re still working through the thousands of images we captured during our 1-month photographic expedition on the Mediterranean islands of Ibiza and Formentera. We were there to create a photographic book about the Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusensis), which is only found in the Pityusic Archipelago of the western Mediterranean. (See our previous updates here: Update 1, Update 2, Update 3.) You can see a gallery of some of our favorite images from the expedition here.

During the expedition, as I approached the project one day at a time, I don’t think I fully appreciated the diversity of the lizards. But now that the adventure is over and I look back on our photos from dozens of different islands, the variation from one population to another, particularly the diversity in color, is stunning! Some of the most amazing inter-island differences occurred between islands that were barely separated at all. Even between islands just a few meters apart – islands that shared similar terrain, climate, and biological communities – there were often stark differences in the color, size, or behavior of their lizard inhabitants.

We decided we needed a standardized approach to document this diversity, so we adopted the white-background “Meet Your Neighbours” style of photography (you might have seen this approach used in the recent National Geographic / National Parks Service “BioBlitz” held in Rocky Mountain National Park). We had research permits that allowed us to capture a couple of lizards from each island population and hold them long enough to photograph them in the Meet Your Neighbours “field studio” before re-releasing them at their site of capture. I think these simple studio portraits do a great job demonstrating the population differences in color!

A selection of lizards we photographed in the white-background Meet Your Neighbours style.

By the end of the month we spent in the Mediterranean, I had also gained a better appreciation for the threats that these lizards face. The IUCN classifies them as “Near Threatened,” and this classification may initially seem counterintuitive to someone visiting Ibiza or Formentera for a vacation – after all, the lizards are abundant all over the islands, even in towns and on crowded tourist beaches. But at the same time, their entire global range encompasses just a few islands, so the lizards are vulnerable even to local human impacts. Luckily for the lizards (or “sargantanas” in the local Catalan language), the governments of Ibiza and Formentera (particularly the latter) seem skeptical of the merits of additional human development. And many of the most distinctive lizard populations are found on tiny, uninhabited islands that are well protected within national parks and marine reserves. We got to visit these islands and interact with many of the local park officials during our expedition; they are passionate folks committed to keeping these places pristine and their natural inhabitants (lizard or otherwise) in a natural state. With great photos and informative text and maps, our book will allow people to experience these small, fragile island ecosystems without ever setting foot there.

A more insidious threat to the unique small-island populations of lizards is illegal collecting for the pet trade. While there are many responsible herpetoculturists who only keep captive-bred specimens – and who work hard to promote reptile and amphibian conservation – there are other collectors who are less ethical. By publishing a book of beautiful photographs showing the amazing geographic variation in the Ibiza Wall Lizard, do we risk perpetuating the demand for rare and exotic color morphs of these lizards in the illegal pet trade? The thought has certainly crossed our minds. But the fact is, those few people who are involved in the illegal wildlife trade already know the lizards well, and most visitors to the islands would never consider taking lizards home with them. So I think our book will help – the more that people acknowledge the lizards as an indispensable part of the islands’ natural heritage, the greater the motivation of the local government will be to keep the sargantanas – and the unique landscape they inhabit – preserved so that tourists and locals can continue to enjoy their amazing reptilian neighbors for generations to come.

We visited dozens of islands during our month-long expedition to the Pityusic archipelago to photograph the endemic Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusesis). We photographed lizards clad in brilliant blue, green, and orange, cryptic brown, and even black. But right from the start, we knew our expedition wouldn’t be complete until we visited Es Vedrà. Es Vedrà is an island shrouded in mystery – it is visible throughout the archipelago, a monumental 1250-foot-high pinnacle of rock rising abruptly from the Mediterranean off the southwest coast of Ibiza. But Es Vedrà is uninhabited and off-limits to the public, so few people have a chance to explore it, and fewer still reach the summit. The island has inspired countless legends through the centuries. Some say it’s the remnants of Atlantis. Others, that Odysseus stopped here. Some of the hippies that live on Ibiza and Formentera even claim that it is a frequent UFO landing site – a sort of interstellar airport! Most importantly for us, however, Es Vedrà is home to what may be the most spectacular population of Ibiza Wall Lizards in the entire archipelago.

The Ibiza Wall Lizards on Es Vedrà, with their deep blue bodies and yellow backs, are totally unlike the lizards on any other island we visited.

During the last week of our expedition, we finally had a chance to face Es Vedrà. This short film (above) chronicles our trek to the summit. Besides photographing the Ibiza Wall Lizards of Es Vedrà for our book, our other objective was to capture a high-resolution panoramic image at the summit, so that everyone following our expedition would be able to share our experience and get a sense of what we could see from the summit. Click on the image below to go to the Gigapan website, where you can explore the panorama, see annotated “snapshots” within the larger image, and learn about the surrounding islands.

Panoramic image captured at the Es Vedra summit. Click to explore!

Es Vedrà was certainly the most dramatic island we visited during our expedition, but every island held surprises, and we did our best to capture the astounding color diversity and the behaviors of lizards everywhere we went. You can see some of the amazing lizards we photographed during the final week of our expedition in this photo gallery. Throughout our trip, we have posted weekly photo galleries that feature some of our favorite images. Check out the following links to see photo galleries from Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3 of our expedition.

Nate and I are back home in the United States now, but we still have a few more stories to share from our adventures in the Pityusic Archipelago. We’ll be back in a week or two with some more photos and fun facts about our expedition!

The sea around Ibiza and Formentera is naturally filtered by the seagrass Posidonia oceanica, so the water is exceptionally clear.

We had an unexpected stroke of luck during the 3^rd week of our expedition to photograph the Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusensis) on the Mediterranean islands of Ibiza and Formentera. We got a visit from our friend Joris van Alphen, a National Geographic Emerging Nature Photographer from The Netherlands. Joris is a fantastic photographer, both on land and in the water (check out his amazing underwater portfolio here).

Because Joris, Nate and I get a lot of questions about our photography – and because each of us approaches photography rather differently – we thought it would be fun to sit down in front of the camera for once, and talk about photography. Check out the video (above) to see what we had to say!

A black male Ibiza Wall Lizard rests on the rugged rocks of Bledes Plano, a small island near Ibiza.

One of the most intensely orange male Ibiza Wall Lizards we have observed so far. Cala Salada, Ibiza. It's hard to believe these two lizards belong to the same species!

Meanwhile, our lizard photography adventure continues! In addition to Ibiza and Formentera, the largest islands in the Pityusic archipelago, we have visited a couple dozen small islands that are uninhabited by humans, including several that are also off-limits to the general public (read about how we get to all these islands here). During the second week of our trip, we spent a few days visiting small islands around Ibiza (including some islands inhabited by completely black lizards!), and we created a photo gallery to document our visits. Though they are all the same species, the Ibiza Wall Lizards on each small island always seem to be different from other populations, and sometimes dramatically so!

We returned to Formentera to re-visit some of our favorite sites and photograph more lizard behavior. Ibiza Wall Lizards have some decidedly un-lizard-like habits; they feed on nectar from flowers, for example, and they also eat small fruits, like the berries of juniper trees. We’ve done our best to document these behaviors, and you can see some of our efforts in our most recent photo gallery from Formentera.

On these resource-poor islands, the lizards will also feed on their own kind… I finally observed my first case of attempted cannibalism today: an adult female ate a juvenile’s still-wiggling tail while the very lucky juvenile managed to escape into the brush! It’s not an easy behavior to see, but Nate has observed cannibalism on several occasions during his years conducting research in these islands. Last year in Formentera, Nate and Joris produced a great short film about these lizards’ dietary adaptations, which you can watch here.

A juvenile Ibiza Wall Lizard cranes its neck to reach the nutritious nectar inside a tubular flower.

We’re back in Ibiza now for the final days of our expedition, but on our last day in Formentera we traveled around the island to photograph popular representations of lizards (or sargantanas in the local Catalan language). We found stylized images of lizards on every conceivable product, from coffee mugs to t-shirts to cigarette lighters, firmly cementing the lizards in our minds as “The Symbol” of the islands. The lizards’ iconic status has also brought attention to our project in the local media – two TV interviews, a radio interview, and two newspaper articles (here and here). We’re optimistic that our book about the Ibiza Wall Lizard will receive the same warm reception we have during our photographic expedition here!

Dr. Nate Dappen gets low to capture a lizard close-up. Bledes Plano, Reserva Natural de Es Vedra, Ibiza.

Dr. Nate Dappen, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Miami, has spent the past three summers on Ibiza and Formentera studying the beautiful Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusensis), a colorful lizard species that can only be found here. This spring, Nate and I raised money through Kickstarter (check out our campaign here) to create a book about the lizards and the islands they inhabit. This trip would be my first visit to the islands, and after hearing Nate’s stories for the last three years, I couldn’t wait to experience them for myself.

The first surprise for me has been how spectacularly colorful the lizards are. I had seen Nate’s photos, but the lizards are even more spectacular in person (and much more colorful than the lizards I study!). On the large island of Formentera, Ibiza Wall Lizards come in every shade of blue, green, and brown, and among the smaller offshore islands, they are even more variable. Despite all this diversity, all of the island populations are currently considered members of a single species. Some researchers are skeptical of this classification, and DNA evidence will likely help us reach a more complete understanding of the Ibiza Wall Lizard’s diversity and evolutionary history.

Whether they belong to one species or several, however, Ibiza Wall Lizards make their home on islands that are bustling with tourists, and their intimate relationship with people has been another surprise. Ibiza and Formentera are among the best-known vacation destinations in the Mediterranean, but the lizards don’t avoid the crowds. On the contrary, they often live around human dwellings and frequent the most popular beaches, where they will skitter out on the sand to investigate beachgoers and search their beach bags for food!

Lizards on small islands generally have few natural predators. As a result, they are often very tame. This Ibiza Wall Lizard was so curious about us that it climbed right onto my camera! Isla des Porcs, Pityuses Archipelago.

We spent the first week of our expedition documenting the color diversity of lizards on Formentera and a few of the surrounding islands. We had some great adventures wading and swimming out to some small islands, and we made a short video about our first few days in Formentera, which you can watch above. You can also see a gallery of some of our favorite photos from the first week of our trip here.

Another welcome surprise, though not a biological one, has been the reception we’ve received from locals on the islands. The Ibiza Wall Lizard (or in the local Catalan language, sargantana) is so ubiquitous on Formentera that it has become the de facto symbol of the islands, and images of the lizards appear everywhere – in the logos of local businesses, on t-shirts and beach towels, and even in people’s jewelry and tattoos.  As a result, Nate has become a minor celebrity on the islands – he’s known as the “Sargantana Man” – and the local media have taken an interest in our project. We’ve already been filmed by two local television crews, and Nate has been interviewed by a local newspaper and radio station too. You can read more about the local response to our work on our blog here.

We have a busy few weeks ahead of us, but we’ll be posting plenty of video and photographic updates as we go. To stay up-to-date with all of our project updates, subscribe to our blog at Day’s Edge Productions, “Like” us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

National Geographic Young Explorer Dr. Neil Losin (UCLA) and his colleague Dr. Nate Dappen (University of Miami) are biologists, photographers, and filmmakers. You can see more of their work at Day’s Edge Productions.

Ibiza’s reptilian icon is called the Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusensis), and it’s an imperiled species that is unique to the Pityusic Archipelago. Images of these lizards appear everywhere – displayed on shop windows, embroidered on hotel towels, and tattooed on the bodies of beachgoers!

Biologist Dr. Nate Dappen of the University of Miami has been studying these lizards for the last three years. What first drew him to these lizards was the dazzling variety of colors they display; on each tiny island in the archipelago (there are more than 40 in all), the lizards have different colors. They range from blue, to green, to orange, to black! As an evolutionary biologist, Dappen is fascinated by all of this diversity, which is virtually unmatched among reptiles.

Ibiza Wall Lizards are unique in other ways, too. Islands can be hard places to live, and animals have to take advantage of any food source they can. The lizards cope with the challenges of island life by drinking nectar and hunting insect pollinators. By traveling from flower to flower, they unwittingly become pollinators themselves! The lizards also eat fruit and travel significant distances before defecating the seeds, making them important seed dispersers for island plants. Most amazing of all, they turn on their own kind when food is scarce, making them frequent cannibals! For some stunning footage of Ibiza Wall Lizard behavior, check out the award-winning short film, which was produced by Dappen with Joris van Alphen, winner of the 2012 National Geographic Emerging Nature Photographer Award.

This summer, Dr. Dappen and I are planning an expedition to Ibiza, Formentera, and the surrounding islands, but this time, it’s not just for science. Despite the Ibiza Wall Lizard’s iconic status, most people don’t know much about it, and there’s really no good source of lizard information for tourists or locals. So we want to create a photo-illustrated, multilingual book to promote awareness and conservation action, ensuring that these lizards will remain the symbol of these islands for generations to come.

To make the book happen, we need your help. We’re raising funds for our expedition here – you can earn cool rewards by backing the project, like limited-edition photographs, signed copies of the finished book, and personal thank-you’s in the book or in our video dispatches from the field. Thank you in advance for your support! With your help, the next time you hear from us will be as we embark on our expedition to photograph these amazing lizards.

Support the Expedition!

National Geographic Young Explorer Neil Losin (UCLA) and his colleague Nate Dappen (University of Miami) are biologists, photographers, and filmmakers. You can see more of their work at Day’s Edge Productions.

Imagine being surrounded by these animals. All of them. Starting to sweat? You should be, because you’re deep inside a stiflingly hot cave, in utter darkness, mired ankle-deep in bat guano. You can’t see the bats, but you know they’re there; you can hear them squeaking as they fly overhead, and feel them as they brush past your skin. Does this sound like a nightmare?

It’s just an average day in a Puerto Rican bat cave, and it’s an environment that I recently chose to enter voluntarily. None of the cave’s inhabitants posed any real threat to me. But that didn’t mean that entering their bizarre subterranean world wasn’t a bit… unsettling.

In August, when I was in Puerto Rico conducting research on anoles, my friend Nate and I went on an expedition to find a particular cave, where – according to the stories we had heard – Puerto Rican Boas (Epicrates inornatus) would hang from the cave walls and capture bats in mid-air as the bats emerged to hunt for insects at nightfall. To a couple of die-hard biologists like us, it sounded too good to be true! Did we find the boas and witness their amazing hunting behavior? Watch the video to find out!

National Geographic Young Explorer Neil Losin (UCLA) and his colleague Nate Dappen (University of Miami) are biologists, photographers, and filmmakers. You can see more of their work at Day’s Edge Productions.

The dynamic brains of teenagers

In this month’s issue of National Geographic, David Dobbs discusses fascinating new science about the adolescent brain (see “Beautiful Brains”). He suggests that the behavior of teens, which can be idiosyncratic (or downright stupid, depending on your perspective!), reflects a very fundamental property of the young brain: it is highly “plastic,” meaning that its development is profoundly influenced by its experiences. According to Dobbs, this unparalleled flexibility, and the odd behavior it sometimes engenders, may actually an adaptation. The benefit – an adult brain that’s finely tuned to its environment – may outweigh the possible costs.

But it doesn’t end there…

Neuroscientists have also begun to realize that the adult brain is far more malleable than we once believed. The more we look, the more we discover that virtually everything we do influences the “wiring” of our brains. With my wife, Liz Losin (a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA), I made this short video about neuroplasticity – the process by which experience changes the adult brain.

P.S. We need your help! If you like the video, you can vote for it in the Society for Neuroscience “People’s Choice” video contest until October 15. Click here to vote (our video is the 5^th one down the page). Thanks!

An occupational hazard

When I’m working in the field in Florida, I get bitten by dozens of anoles every day. I can’t blame them–if I were suddenly captured by an enormous creature wielding a noose on a fishing pole, I’d probably bite my captor too! Luckily, the bites aren’t too painful; anoles are generally small (a few inches long and about one-quarter of an ounce in weight), and their tiny teeth rarely break the skin. Still, until recently I never imagined that I’d actually be encouraging my research subjects to bite.

Why measure bite force?

That changed after my 2010 field season, when I discovered that crested anoles (Anolis cristatellus) had a subtly different head shape in Florida – where they are an invasive species–than in their native range of Puerto Rico. In lizards, head shape is related to “bite force,” the amount of force an animal can exert between its jaws. I found that Florida’s crested anoles had more robust heads than Puerto Rico’s crested anoles, suggesting that they might also be capable of biting harder.

This year, one of my goals was to measure the bite force of crested anoles directly. If bite force is, in fact, greater in Florida than in Puerto Rico, what would that mean? Well, it would suggest that something about Florida’s environment favors individuals that can bite harder. Maybe crested anoles encounter insects with particularly hard exoskeletons in Florida. Or perhaps a powerful bite helps male crested anoles defend territories against rival species in Florida that do not occur in Puerto Rico. Either way, the first step is testing whether native and invasive crested anoles differ in bite force.

Measuring bite force in Florida and Puerto Rico meant, of course, traveling to Puerto Rico (oh, the injustice!). While I was there, my friend Nate Dappen and I filmed this short video to show how – and why – one measures a lizard’s bite.

To see a previous episode of Field Vision featuring my work in Florida, click here.

Meet the Contenders

I’ve spent the last three months in Miami, studying lizards in the genus Anolis. I study the ways that closely related species interact, and how their interactions affect each species’ ecology and evolution.

Anoles in Florida are a great study system for addressing my research questions. They’re common, fiercely territorial, and they’ve been the subject of evolutionary and ecological research for decades. In South Florida, several exotic species have recently become established alongside the native green anole (Anolis carolinensis), so there are plenty of species interactions to observe.

I’ve chosen to focus on two Caribbean lizards with very similar habits. The Brown Anole of Cuba (Anolis sagrei) and the Crested Anole of Puerto Rico (Anolis cristatellus) have only been living together in South Florida for a few decades. My goal is to understand how these species manage to coexist, despite the potential for competition.

The Battle at Hand

One of my goals this season is to figure out just how intensely the two species compete in nature. How can I accomplish this? Well, one way to determine the effect that one species has on another is to perform a “removal experiment,” removing one species and observing what happens to individuals of the other species. Do their territories get larger? Does the way they use the habitat change? Do they catch more prey, or grow faster?

These experiments take a lot of work! We have to mark lots of individuals so we can keep track of them throughout the experiment, then observe each anole carefully before and after the “removal” occurs. This short video reveals my removal experiment and shows how–with the help of some excellent field assistants–I’m making it happen.