The lizard kings
Crack band of scientists search unexplored areas of Ecuadorean cloud forests for treasure — new species of reptiles never seen before
Omar Torres-Carvajal likens it to a treasure hunt. Under cover of darkness, flashlight in hand, he skulks through humid Ecuadorean cloud forests, head on a swivel, checking the tree trunks and ferns.
The prize for Torres-Carvajal is the dwarf dragon, the biggest (as long as 40 centimetres) and most colourful of South American lizards that look strikingly like miniature versions of their mythological namesakes.
But the curator of reptiles from the Museo de Zoologia QCAZ at the Catholic University of Ecuador isn’t looking for just any wood lizards, as they are commonly called. Torres is looking for lizards no one has identified.
He and his team are impressively good at it. They recently discovered three new species, including two that Torres-Carvjal found in Ecuador. The other was found by another study leader in Peru. There are now 15 identified species of wood lizards, almost doubling the number known in 2006.
“It is probably the highlight of our job,” said Torres-Carvajal, when reached on campus in Quito. He’s been studying wood lizards for so long, he said he often knows immediately when he has found something “weird.”
“For people who work in museums with things related to biodiversity, it’s one of the most exciting feelings you can have; like when you get a really nice present at Christmas.”
Torres-Carvajal has “described” — the formal process of scientifically identifying a new species, more than 20 reptiles in South America, something that at first sounds remarkable but he says is partially explained by circumstances.
“(Scientists) have been doing this for centuries, so you would think it is amazing that we are finding more new species in the 21st century, but there’s a good explanation for it.
“It is that we are kind of focusing on areas that no one has been before or where not a lot of collections have been made and maybe focusing on groups that no one has worked on a lot before,” he says.
“This is not the only region where this is happening. You also have areas in the Philippines or India or Sri Lanka where they are constantly finding new species of reptiles and amphibians in the last few years.”
James Bogart, professor emeritus in the University of Guelph’s department of integrative biology, explains that a big part of it is the common use of DNA analysis to help separate species.
“We pick up a lot of things that are so-called cryptic species, meaning they look about the same as something else but they really are genetically quite different,” he says.
“Ecuador is a wonderful place. Because of all the mountains, there are so many habitat types. As you move up the mountains, you might have different species at different elevations.” (By contrast, Ontario has only one native lizard species, the five-lined skink.)
Torres-Carvajal says he expects the scientific community to continue discovering new species.
“We are really working hard to uncover that hidden diversity,” he says. “We are really worried about it getting lost and factors that might lead to the extinction of many species that we didn’t even know we had.”