This year’s field work: run lizard, run!

This year’s field work season was a bit more intense than normally, as we started a new project: measuring the locomotive performance of the lizards. As part of the TIPEX project (led by Jean-François Le Galliard, from iEES in Paris, funded by the French ANR), we want to study the link between life history, senescence and climate change in our monitored population. Within that context, an interesting measure of performance is locomotive performance, as it is a good measure of general physical condition of the individuals. And so, we started to make them (gently) run!

And boy! That was a new level of organisation, since we had to transfer many individuals from the field to the lab and back! We had to double the size of the team, with a part of the team in the lab, and the other in the field! But in the end, we managed. This couldn’t have been possible without the help of Léa Koch, the Master student who took upon her to perform the locomotive measurements in the lab while we were on the field (with the help of the other interns of course)! I’m happy to announce that Léa is now starting a PhD thesis, as part of the TIPEX project. (This means, that, for her delight, she’ll make lizards run for at least the three years to come, every summer! 🎉)

Nonetheless, everything went smoothly this year, even the internet subscription (see the previous episode)! the weather in May and June being relatively awful, and somewhat cold, the lizards were again a bit delayed in their phenology, meaning that we had to stay longer during August… Bye bye my vacation!

With the TIPEX measurements starting this year, and many new members of the staff starting to work on the EvoGenArch ERC project this year coming to the field next summer, these are exciting times for the lizard team here!