Where has this week gone? Time really does fly when you travel halfway around the world, snorkel, and dive through coral reefs by day. Even more so when you creep around buildings and bushes to capture nocturnal lizards that defy gravity by night. The nights have been especially “vivacious” for the lizard group. The lizard group has been hard at work staying up late to collect data for a few projects focusing on the interaction between the local gecko species. One species, the Indo-Pacific House Gecko, Hemidactylus frenatus is invasive, adding extra competition for food and what not for the native species, so we’re hoping the results of our project can tell us how the native species are faring.
One project consists of the lizard group conducting a census around the research station and around several bushes, known as the candlestick bush, Senna alata. We looked at these bushes because we noticed them to be a hotspot for geckos; for some reason the geckos love this plant. As part of the protocol, the lizard group must walk around a census site and search and identify the species of any gecko we see. For every gecko we spot, we must sweep around the site 2 more times. This made particularly large sites quite interesting. There was this one site which consisted of a very large candlestick bush in we had to walk a total distance of 62 meters (about 190 feet). Gecko would appear out of nowhere. Sometimes we would walk around the bush barely completing our two sweeps when at the very end of the walk we spot another gecko, resulting in the group having to walk around the bush yet another two times. One night we (the lizard group) spent over an hour and a half spotting geckos on that one bush!
With all that searching we managed to come up with a theme song for our census:
♪ “This is the bush that neeever eeeends. Yes it goes on and on, my frieeend! Some people started searching it, not knowing how much we’d find, and geckos will keep showing up forever just because…this is the bush that neeever eeeends…♫


Anyways, so the census went on for four nights, with the lizard group usually finishing around midnight. They’ve all been successful – we got lots of data! Most of the group fantasize about sleeping in after a long night. The hunger for breakfast and the urge to scuba dive in the morning overrides that tendency. And it is always worth it when you’re enjoying your meals in good company and getting the chance to potentially dive with sharks!  Plus I mean, come on – we have to savor this trip in Tahiti as much as possible. Every moment here in Tahiti has been amazing!

Oh, as for other updates. The fish groups have been observing and spearing fish (Andy and Mitch have been warriors at it) while shifting more of their time in the lab conducting protein assays and dissecting eyeballs. Also, the guys managed to get their chance to do some grocery shopping (a relief the shop was able to accept US dollars).

From here on in the lizard group will be catching geckos and run them on a vertical racetrack on different substrates as part of our second project.

Well I’ve got to fly (or…swim). Going to catch the next boat for scuba diving!

Peace,
Eddie