As every year, we travelled to the Mediterranean region for fieldwork this spring. This year’s campaign had two main objectives: first, to collect animals from Sicily to establish breeding groups for a new project; and second, to sample three species of Podarcis that we had not previously worked with.
To achieve the first objective, Robin Pranter, Emanuele Berrilli and I flew to Catania in early April. Over the course of roughly a week, we sampled several populations of the Italian wall lizard, Podarcis siculus. Although we had visited Sicily a couple of years earlier, this time we focused on exploring the eastern part of the island in greater detail. This gave us the opportunity to visit some spectacular mountain landscapes, with one particular highlight being the chance to sample lizards on the lava fields of Mount Etna.
We then moved to the southeastern corner of Sicily. Besides arancini (fried rice balls) and pistachios, Sicily is also famous among herpetologists for a particular form of the Italian wall lizard: the concolor morph. These lizards have lost the characteristic green-and-black patterns typically found on their backs and instead display a uniform, unpatterned coloration. We are about to launch a new research project in aimed at uncovering the developmental and genetic basis of this polymorphism. To establish the foundation for this work, we collected 52 lizards representing both morphs to create a new lab population.
Once all lizards had been secured in their small cloth bags and placed in a cooler inside our rental car, we began the 2,500 km journey back to Plön. Thanks to the excellent preparations by the animal care- and facility services-teams at the MPI, all enclosures were already set up and waiting for the Sicilians, who quickly settled into their new homes. First mission completed.
After a few days of rest, it was time for the second part of our field season, which took us to the Peloponnese in Greece. This time, the team consisted of Guannan Wen, Natalia Zajac, Iris Ruesink Bueno, long-term collaborator Geoff While from the University of Tasmania, and myself. The Peloponnese is a particularly special place because five Podarcis species co-occur there — typically there is just a single species found in a given region. This made the trip especially exciting, but also somewhat challenging, as it meant considerably more work!
Since our aim was to capture as much geographic variation as possible, we did our best to explore the entire peninsula, from pristine mountain lakes and seaside castle ruins to less glamorous agricultural fields and, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, numerous cemeteries. From a lizard’s perspective, however, a gravestone is simply the perfect basking platform.
The three weeks passed in a blink, and we returned with a wealth of samples, data, and memories from the trip. It always feels like a privilege to observe lizards in their natural habitat. And after all, this is what often inspires new research ideas!
A big thanks to the team for all the hard work!!! You are the best 😊
Nathalie Feiner