[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find. Now.
Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees, Strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, FOREIGN.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschutz.
Today our topic is lizards, but not just any lizard. Rather, the valley dragon, which nowadays is found mostly in the San Joaquin desert. Who knew there was a San Joaquin desert or valley dragons living there? The lizard is more commonly called the blunt nosed leopard lizard. It has disappeared from 85% of its historical range as a result of agriculture and rural and urban development and pesticides. It's now listed as an endangered species.
My guests today are involved in efforts to restore viable populations of the blunt nosed leopard lizard. Dr. Rory Telemico is research director at the Fresno chaffee zoo. And Dr. Michael Westphal is biologist at the Central coast field office of the Bureau of Land Management.
The Fresno Chaffee Zoo is raising leopard lizards and releasing them back into the wild. Equipped with radio telemetry backpacks, data are everywhere.
Well, doctors Telemenco and Westphal, welcome to Sustainability now.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: Thank you. Happy to be here.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Why don't we begin with some background information?
Who are you? What do you do? How did you get into the fields that you specialize in? And how did you get into the business of lizard protection?
[00:02:10] Speaker D: I'm Mike Westphal.
I got into lizards when I was about five years old.
I started. But my oldest sister had an alligator lizard on a little bit of yarn that she would let right around on her shoulder. And so I had mentoring into it. But I lived in a place where lizards were to be had. And I think I'm, I'm, my training in grad school was in genetics. I must have a predisposition to it because I, I, I took to it and, uh, it's just been my thing ever since. And, uh, so in the fullness of time, I went on to get a PhD and snakes, actually, which are the other lizard, really.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: So that's why I saw the photo of you with the snake around your neck rather than the lizard on the string.
[00:02:57] Speaker D: Those are to be had too. But of course, if people don't know snakes are a branch on the lizard family tree. So there are certain lizards that are less, well, related to each other than snakes are to some lizards.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Let's let Rory say something about himself and then, you know, we'll come back, we'll come back to this question of how, how you got into lizard protection, you know. Okay, yeah.
[00:03:21] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Rory Telomico. I'm currently the director of conservation science at Fresno Chaffee Zoo. And I, I got into biology and lizard biology through, through, through a route of when I was a kid. I was basically a total dino nut, like the stereotype of a dino nut.
I basically acted like and looked like Timmy from Jurassic park, if you remember that.
The little boy and I even went into considering paleontology. But the university I went to had a biology program and a lizard biologist at it. It did not have a paleontology program. So I started working with him, a person by the name of Troy Baird, right when I was a freshman working with actually one of the leopard lizards, close relatives, the eastern collared lizard.
And I've been working with lizards and with forays into snakes and turtles ever since. I did my graduate work in ecology and evolutionary biology. So one of the things Mike and I kind of share is this training in sort of what's considered the core biological sciences that we've then brought into conservation rather than sort of growing up in the conservation realm. So we bring some unique toolkits to our work that, that, that I find have been really helpful to us, especially as we work with other colleagues that don't have that training per se, specifically.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: With the leopard lizard. How did that come about?
[00:04:42] Speaker C: So Mike here was on my PhD committee and I came out here, look, doing a project for my PhD on sort of the evolution of alligator lizards, southern and northern alligator lizards. And he was helping me find lizard sites and. But he knew of this cool endangered lizard that had one population sort of left and in an area we were sort of looking or it wasn't too far out of the way. And he drove me out there to see the blunt nosed leopard lizards. And it was my, my first time interacting with them and first time really not only getting a chance to see them, but even thinking about them very much. They are these sort of wonderful, remarkable animals. I then, you know, in the fullness of time had done postdocs and was going to get a job here and I was invited, well, not invited. My first position was at Fresno State as a faculty member. And I called Mike back up because I was new, I was sort of in the backyard and was wondering what he was up to and if anything had changed with those leopard lizards. And he invited me and some other Colleagues out and we went looking for them again. And the population he had shown me just a few years before when I was a student that was booming at the time had. Had crashed. We had a very hard time finding any. And that sort of lit a fire at least under me, to start working on what was going on and to see if I could use those skills I developed in graduate school with more common species to possibly turn things around for this endangered species that only lived here in central California.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: One of the things that's interesting to me is this notion of the San Joaquin Desert, which I had never heard of until very recently.
And anyone who drives down Highway 5 recognizes that the southern end of the San Joaquin is quite dry but irrigated. So tell us something about the San Joaquin Desert. You know, what is it? What is its extent and why isn't it developed?
[00:06:35] Speaker C: Well, it is the.
Through the southwestern region of the San Joaquin Valley, as well as the Carrizo Valley and the Kiama Valley, which is all that sort of southwestern area. And it's also, you could consider it as sort of the uplands of the San Joaquin Valley. And it's, you know, it's always been a desert. We just didn't necessarily recognize it as one. And a lot of that is historical artifact. So the first naturalists that were characterizing the San Joaquin Valley and the ecosystems there were riding along on the trains. They were just literally on the backs of the trains looking out at what they saw and writing down what they were seeing. And the train track area, supposedly even more so than the rest of the valley, were covered in grasses, largely through the impact of the European colonization into the area. And so they wrote down that it was grassland because that's what they saw looking out those windows or looking off the trains. And that sort of created this historical inertia to where everyone that came out there, you know, if you kind of have in your head, it's going to be a grassland and you're looking for a grassland and you happen to see a lot of grass, you think, oh, this is a grassland. And a grassland really only differs from a desert in being dominated by grasses. And it tends to get some more water. A desert does. But they're both grasslands can be quite arid as well and quite hot. And it was, as time went on, people started considering, oh, wait, this doesn't seem like sort of the norm, quote unquote, normal grassland. For starters, the vast majority of grasses we're seeing, we have good evidence weren't here pre European colonization.
They are, they are More invasive. They were brought by that European colonization.
Whether it was on purpose or on accident is pretty unclear because grasses come along with people and their animals pretty readily. And then when started looking even more at the rain patterns and the temperature, the ecosystem aligns better with what we would typically call desert than grassland. Just in those, they're called abiotic. The sort of non living factors as well. And it turns out even as far back as 1953, there were ecologists calling the area a desert. There were maps of American desert that included the San Joaquin Valley in it, even if it hadn't been given a unique name yet. That name, this is the San Joaquin Desert, came about more in the 90s through a real recognition that not only are those abiotic factors very desert, but many of the native species are not only desert acclimated, but they're really quite evolutionarily unique. They only live there.
I don't know, maybe some of your listeners have heard of this notion of the California Floristic province, this idea that California is a biodiversity hotspot. It's an internationally recognized biodiversity hotspot.
We have that recognition because of the number of endemic species that live in California.
Endemics just mean that they live there and nowhere else on Earth. A really large fraction of those endemics are only found in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
When you have this unique group of organisms, plants and animals that don't occur anywhere else, and then you have the lack of precipitation and the heat of a desert, and all the animals that seem to occur there are sort of desert adapted, unique species. That's sort of the combination of things that came together and was finally recognized in the 90s when Germano and some other colleagues decided we really should name this a unique desert ecosystem, the San Joaquin Desert.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Historically, was the desert larger, you know, before. Before farmers and irrigation arrived?
[00:10:08] Speaker C: Well, certainly before farmers and irrigation arrived, yes. There was more area than what you drive through now that you would recognize as desert.
We kind of. It honestly is. Is amazing engineering. We turned a landscape that was partially wetland with major rivers in it and even a massive lake, the largest west of the Rockies. And so you had part wetland and part upland desert. And by rerouting those rivers and draining the lake and using irrigated agriculture, we took what was sort of part really wet, part really dry, and made it all kind of in between wet and dry through irrigation so that we could plant large farms and things. And it's not unique to the San Joaquin Desert areas like in the Sonoran Desert or heavily farmed through irrigation as well. And so parts of those areas have been lost, but pretty much any of the wild places, although there's not much of it left that you would find in that area of the southwestern San Joaquin Valley, the Kiyama and the Carrizo still have some of that desert feel to them, even though they're covered in more grass than would have been there historically.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Well, there are lizards all over California.
What makes this particular one so special? And maybe you can also tell us a bit about what it looks like, where it used to be found, you know, the background information about, about the lizard.
[00:11:33] Speaker D: I can speak a little bit about that and then Rory can, can correct my mistakes. But desert lizards are really cool. And if you look at the desert lizard fauna as a group, I think all or at least 90% of those species originated in the Southwest desert.
So, you know, a lot of other animals on this continent, you'll see they have, you know, counterparts in Europe or in Asia, but these, like, if you look at the family tree of desert lizards, they all came from, you know, an ancestor that lived in the Southwest desert. So the Southwest desert generated this amazing lizard diversity. And again, correct me if I'm wrong, Rory, of which the, the leopard lizard is, is an interesting component because it's, it's a big predatory lizard. And, you know, other lizards are mid range, smaller critters, but the leopard lizards kind of large and in charge. And if you go down to the Mojave, you see bigger lizards, you'll see chuckwallas, big herbivorous lizards, or you'll see the sister, you know, the collared lizards, and you'll see all these other things. But in the San Joaquin Desert, the lizard fauna is what we call it the pauperate. There. There's all these things that live. There are, have desert sisters in the Mojave and the Storm deserts, but there's only a few of them. There's leopard lizards and spiny lizards and night lizards, whereas you have, you know, many more species in the Mojave. So one of the things that's great about leopard lizards is that's still there and it's hanging on. And it's also beautiful. I mean, it's a spectacularly beautiful animal. Both the males and females have beautiful colors on them. They express.
Rory talked about paleontology. It's like we have a dinosaur in our backyards. And they're just very, very precious to me for that because I also wanted to be a paleontologist.
[00:13:27] Speaker C: Yeah. And as you mentioned, they are, they are really gorgeous for People that maybe don't have an idea in their head of what these look like. They are, they're the blunt nosed leopard lizard and they're called that because they have a shorter face than some of their relatives. They have a relative that lives in the Mojave in the Great Basin desert called the long nose leopard lizard, which has a long face. And the blunt nosed leopard lizard has this short squat face.
They're about 6, 8 inches long. About 4 inches of that is the body. So they're not huge, but they're a substantial sized lizard.
They've got these big heads and the babies in fact have they almost like bobbleheads, the, the new babies. It's like half their body is this big head. It's sort of amazing. They can lift them up sometimes.
They're a sandy color on the background and they've got white bars that go across their back and black spots, which is where the leopard lizard name comes from.
And they have. The females get this bright orange, like traffic cone orange, spotting a blotching pattern that extends all down their sides from their, their cheeks and their eyes and into their tail. And they only have that during the reproductive season. And the males get this. They don't have those like quite as intense blotches. They get this light, we call it a salmon wash. It's this sort of faint pink toning that they get in their underside and their under regions as well, which is quite dramatic against the, the sort of tans and whites and browns of the rest of their body. And despite having so much coloration, they absolutely disappear on the sort of like desert asphalt sort of landscape that they would, they would typically live on. It is, I can't count the number of times I have come close to stepping on one because I just didn't see it. Even though I am quite good at seeing lizards compared to the average person.
And you then see them start to run and it's like, oh my goodness, there was one right there.
But they are, they are these gorgeous animals.
They, as Mike mentioned, they are one of a relatively few number of lizard species that live in the San Joaquin Valley, especially compared to other areas of California, like the Southwest in the Mojave area.
And as part of that there.
This notion of dip operacy is really important for ecology and conservation because one of the general sort of principles of ecology is that the more diverse and interconnected an ecosystem, the more robust it is.
And by robust I just mean that it's able to sort of weather changes in the environment that might come, they might Be short term things like a storm or a fire. They might be longer term things like anthropogenic or human induced changes to the landscape. But the more species you have there interconnected and interacting with one another, the better able the ecosystem is to weather that. So loss of really any species from that can be harmful for the long term persistence of an ecosystem and function of an ecosystem. And while yes, one species could possibly be lost without having a big impact, at some point there is a huge impact and it tends to be precipitous when there is a change, you see like nothing, nothing, nothing, and then dramatically shifts to the ecosystems where it no longer is recognizable as the system it was before. And it's very, very, very hard to predict when that's going to happen.
So sort of the safest thing to do is try to keep as many connections together as you can if your goal is to preserve the functioning of an ecosystem. So an example of that in the case of our leopard lizards is they are right smack dab in the middle of the food web. They are major predators, primarily eating arthropods, so insects and spiders.
They will also occasionally eat other lizards, smaller lizards, like the side blotch lizard, they seem to do that more in the southern extent of their range actually than the northern. It's sort of a unique thing we're discovering about them, this preference in diet. And then they're also like the Snickers bar of the desert. They're basically the size of a Snickers bar. And every predator bigger than them would happily eat them. From birds to snakes to foxes to badgers, everything seems to want to eat these leopard lizards. So they're both an important predator and an important food source. And when you remove them from the ecosystem, you have both. The insect prey like grasshoppers that they were heavily eating can increase in abundance. And the predators either lose, completely lose food or they start predating higher on other species that sort of are a similar level of the niche. Things like the Blaineville horned lizard, which is not as endangered as our blunt nosed leopard lizard, but is another California unique species and it is a species of special concern.
So sort of inadvertently when we lose the leopard lizard, we can see increased pressure on the horned lizard as well. But when they're both there, they can sustain the predator base more, more easily. And then the predators, many of which are unique, like the San Joaquin kit fox, has a prey source it can better eat and live on.
So really keeping any of these things in that middle of the food web can be important for the full ecosystem, some functioning.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host Ronnie Lipschitz and my guests today are Dr. Rory Pelomico and Michael Westfall, who are both biologists who work on protecting and conserving the blunt nosed leopard lizard, which lives in the San Joaquin Valley. And we're just talking about the lizard's position and food webs.
And I do have a question about that. And that is if the lizard disappears, does the food web crash? What happens, you know, if predators can't find enough food, then they basically starve or what do they do?
[00:19:16] Speaker C: They either have to be flexible enough to eat something else. So I was talking about the notion of another lizard that's about the same size they could eat is the Blaineville horned lizard. So then they're putting pressure on other species, increased pressure, or you're right, they, they, they cease to persist. They, they go extinct if they don't have a sufficient food base.
Some predators are very, what's called flexible things. Like coyotes can kind of eat just about anything and are smart and will figure out how to eat different things. Other predators much less so if their favorite food sort of disappears, they're not good at finding a new thing to eat, at least. At our site we found roadrunners, coach whips, which are a type of snake. Loggerhead shrikes seem to really like eating blunt nosed leopard lizards.
[00:20:03] Speaker D: And I wouldn't ignore the other half, which is the regulation of, of arthropods. I mean we've done a lot of studies on the arthropod prey base, heavy grasshopper eaters. They also eat beetles. But one insect predator does a lot of work in a community on, you know, call it regulating or what have you, but they, they maintain insects at a certain level just like rabbits maintain grasses and forage at certain levels. If you get rid of all the coyotes in a system in order to keep them from eating your sheep, all your rabbits are going to eat all your forage and you're still not going to have sheep. So I would say that their predation holds a big role. And I'd also just add that blended leopard lizard has also been identified as an umbrella species, which means that its requirements to live nicely define the San Joaquin desert, such that if you target the leopard lizard as something to conserve, especially by maintaining its habitat, you're saving everything else. And so in ecology we have ideas like foundation species, keystone species, ecological engineers. We also had the concept of the poster species, which is an actual conservation concept for the pragmatic Reasons of conservation. And so leopard lizards are ecologically, I guess, quasi, administratively and ecologically an umbrella species. It gives us a target that is bang for the buck, very cost effective. Preserve this lizard and we're preserving lots of things. And it's also a great poster child for this desert. And I guess one of the reasons I stress that it lives in the San Joaquin desert is there are large parts of the San Joaquin Valley that are not desert. And I've had discussions with other biologists where they, they shook off the concept. Well, no, it's like there's tiger salamanders and there's this and that. Well, those are over say on the east side of the valley, whereas a lot of that desert's kind of on the west side. And to save the leopard lizard, it's more efficient to save the desert. And so I've really made most of the last part of my career about the desert. And this is how we're going to say leopard lizard. And, and by saving leopard lizard, we saved the desert. So you'll hear me saying San Joaquin King desert a lot.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: I have a couple of questions about this. The first one is one of you mentioned going out there and seeing lots of lizards and then the population crashed.
And I'm curious, did you see changes in the desert ecology from before and after that crash?
[00:22:24] Speaker C: We are, but it's not an instantaneous change. I understand that there's this lag. Well, the crash happened quite recently. We're like 2019, so we're only five, six years out from it and still seemingly seeing some of those effects. The best we understand is the, the crash was likely precipitated by some of the extreme droughts that were happening in 2013 or 14.
And then, you know, we'd have some relief, but then it would come back again. And so they had. Where they weren't being able to successfully reproduce and recruit. And these lizards have a very short life cycle. So a couple years of failed recruitment and you have the population begin to crash.
What it looks like happened is a few of those bad years sort of stacked up on them and then they, they went through just sort of a rapid vortex decline. And that's why we somewhat lost those lizards. But this year, actually at our site specifically, we've also noticed a recent rapid decline in the grasshoppers that we're not sure of.
And another lizard species, the side blotch lizard, which used to be extremely common out there and is a, is a considered a very common species.
Suddenly when we used to see 50, 60 easily every time we do a few hours survey, we're seeing half a dozen maybe and we're not exactly sure why that's happened or if it's a permanent change.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: What's the time range over which these kinds of changes happen? You know, you said it's only been five years, right, since, since the crash. What would be a period of time, you know, over which you could make a kind of a determination that the ecology had been significantly changed.
[00:24:09] Speaker C: That's largely going to be dependent on the generation time of the species in the system. And so you'll have some species that can be rapid indicators, which the blunt nosed leopard lizard might be one of, that has a short generation time. So they, they reach maturity in a year and in the wild they rarely live more than three years.
And then there are other species that live much longer. They could live decades. And so they can then weather these things as adults longer. And unless you're being able to track the reproductive output, you could miss a sort of impending crash. It's kind of analogous to me to, to how we never can quite say a financial recession is happening until we're deep into it after the fact. In hindsight you can see that these changes were stacking up, but when you're still living in it, it can be really hard to determine, especially if you're in a little like mini blip and it's going to bounce back or whether you're at the leading edge of this rapid decline.
[00:25:04] Speaker D: And then I'm going to add in because I know we're going to loop back to this eventually. We talked about drought and the impact of lizard on the lizard and it can be counterintuitive people that drought would matter to desert species. Why would they live in deserts if droughts are going to impact them? When you start to learn about deserts, you learn that water is important in deserts and productivity is important for things live in deserts, they get monsoons. There is water in the system. The other component that we are dealing with recycling back to these non native grasses that bloke the desert and hid the desert. From our view, those grasses are not good for leopard lizards. I think you concur with me on that, Rory?
[00:25:41] Speaker C: Oh, very much so. They do not like thick grass. And if you find thick grass, your odds of finding a leopard lizard in that habitat are extremely low.
It's sort of a quick clue.
They're not just harder to see, they're not, they're not there. Which is kind of confusing because some of their relatives aren't as impacted by grasses. But it seems to just be part of their, their evolutionary history. You know, them as well as many of the other vertebrates that, that occur in that ecosystem, spent millions of years not interacting with grasses, at least not many grasses. And now we're in a situation over just the last 200 years or so of them being in a world that can be fully dominated by these grasses. And they don't move through it well, they don't choose to move through it.
They don't forage well when they get dropped in a really grassy area. And we've, we've been able to sort of experimentally show this now if you literally move one to a really grassy area, they'll hunker into a burrow and not do anything else. They just sort of wait there hoping it gets better. Whereas if you give them access to sort of open ground where they, and I don't know if it's more just that they can move better or they can see better, but it alters their behavior, they will then start to forage, look for mates, do the things an animal needs to do to interact with its ecosystem and persist.
[00:27:02] Speaker D: And thermally, those grasses are not a good place for them to be either. And they're on certain heat regimes and they can get too hot. And we know a lot about that. So being ecologists now, drought. But don't the grasses do really well when it's not droughty? Don't droughts get. And so what we can say is that if you have a year to year, decade to decade, millennia to millennia, stable situation, that can be good for animals persisting, especially if they've co evolved in a certain place. If you start introducing these oscillations, well, first you've introduced the grass. When it's a wet year, the grass gets super, super, super thick, right? And then, and then there's a drought, but the grass is still there. So we're dealing with that right now. So in this oscillating system, so you could say there's maybe a sweet spot where it's not too droughty and not too thatchy, but you can go a period of 10 or 20 years where that sweet spot just doesn't occur and so that oscillates. So it's a little, you know, it's a second level way of looking at it that we have these oscillations in whether that might be causing them now to, to not be able to persist.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guests Today are doctors Rory Telemico and Michael Westfall who work on, on the lizard conservation, specifically conservation of the blunt nosed leopard lizard, also called the valley dragon, I gather in the San Joaquin Desert, which I think very few people in California know anything about.
So a couple of questions arise from this, but I want to get to the, to the endangered species aspect and the, the, the captive raising of the lizards and release. And. But the first one has to do.
[00:28:48] Speaker C: With.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: The historical range of the lizard.
Okay, how, how big was that? And then the second one is, do you, are you seeing impacts of climate change on the ecology of the San Joaquin Desert?
[00:29:04] Speaker C: Yes to both.
Well, I guess the first one was.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Not a yes question.
[00:29:08] Speaker C: It's a range.
They have a relatively narrow range compared to a lot of other species. It is the historic uplands of the San Joaquin Valley. They go maybe a little further north historically than the Panoche Hills region, but they do not make it up to the delta. They then would have occurred along sort of that western foothill and slope of the San Joaquin Valley just inside the coast ranges down into Kern county, and sort of would wrap along, though they would have not been right around the Tulare Lake region, that was more wetland, and then sort of skirted the edge of the valley north up to a little north of Fresno, probably. Historically they certainly used to occur around Fresno. The very first, the sort of type specimen that was first collected and described to the species is labeled as coming from Fresno. But that's sort of the most of the historic range, when we draw little blobs of it, will include basically that whole southern San Joaquin Valley. But they would never have really occurred in the, like where Tulare Lake was. They maybe would have occasionally gone into the seasonal wetlands. It's really uncertain. We don't have good records and there's not much paleontological data that I'm aware of at least to pull from. And then they also made it into the sort of sister valleys, if you look at the California map, that are just to the south and west of the Central Valley. Those are the, the Carrizo Valley and the Kayama Valley. The Carrizo in particular is currently sort of the strongest hold of San Joaquin Desert habitat really that we have left. So if people want to see San Joaquin Desert, that's probably the best place to go.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: Isn't Carriza also a site of, of significant solar development or northern port has been.
That's another factor, I suppose. Or that could become a really important factor. Anyway, sorry I interrupted you.
[00:31:08] Speaker D: Well, if I can Take up. I wanted to mention.
So the Bloodnut leopard lizard, we had a major paper on their, their population structure through genetic methods and this came out in 2017.
Our primary author was John Richmond from USGS. And what was fascinating about what we found is that the ancestors of the blunt nosed leopard lizard colonized the San Joaquin Valley many millions ago, several years million million years ago, and since then existed in the desert around these features like Tulare Lake. And we can still see the signature of that. So there's a very distinct northern group that's quite distinct from a southern group. But we also can see in the genetic data where a land bridge between the major lakes at the time let them get out towards the east side of the valley and could see all of this as primordial structure. And what's nice is, is that that primordial structure is still there. So we still have stuff to work with. You know, we haven't lost big components of that, but it does mean that we have very different lizards in the north than we do in the south.
[00:32:12] Speaker C: Yeah, the estimated divergence time for them is about two and a half million years. So that's since they shared a common ancestor and would have been split by the lake, which maybe doesn't sound like all that much time. But that's also about the divergence time between humans and chimpanzees.
So a lot of change can happen. And they have shorter generations than us, so they've actually had more opportunity for evolutionary change. We definitely know they have some differences in biology. Whether or not you would want to call them different species is sort of a human philosophical thing more than a biological thing, but they have. There certainly are some differences that we're starting to detect. Like I mentioned, the seeming difference in diet. We have some hints that they might thermoregulate differently. There actually might be. I hate to say it, but there might be two endangered leopard lizards in the valley, not just one.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: Can the two populations reproduce with each other?
[00:33:05] Speaker C: It depends on what you mean by can. It's kind of like a lion and a tiger.
They don't coexist, so they never have the opportunity. But if you put them together, you can get babies. Yeah, we suspect. I don't know if anyone actually has done that, but the lizard's been listed.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: As an endangered species. When did that happen and why or how? I don't know what the right question is.
[00:33:27] Speaker C: Yeah, it was in 1967 in the inaugural Federal Endangered Species list, and they actually were listed by the state of California as a Fully protected species even before that. So California was sort of at the forefront of sort of conservation law in the early 60s. And they decided to list the bloodnose leopard lizard, along with the California condor and the San Francisco garter snake and a handful of other species that were seen as, these are some of the most unique and imperiled species in California, and we need to give them this full protected status.
[00:34:04] Speaker B: Well, let's move on. The Chaffee Fresno Zoo has a captive. What do you call it? A captive reproduction project.
Yeah, tell us about that and how that has happened.
[00:34:17] Speaker C: Happy to. So in 2019, I was catching back up with Mike, and we went out to Panoche Plateau, which is the only area of that northern group of leopard lizards on federally protected land. And it had been this booming population.
And through a bunch of work that Mike had done these every year for 10 years, he'd been going out and doing both visual surveys as well as hiring groups of conservation dogs to come out on the landscape and detect scat, the feces of the lizards on the ground. And you could use that to get a sense of how many lizards were out there. And I've been seeing these drops. And then in late 2019, we found one baby. When we went out in the sort of season defined babies. And then in 2020, we were like, all right, let's do a real project out here. And so we were just going to start getting started. We wanted to look at the ecology of the species. And we were really trying to compare with some colleagues, that northern group site with a southern group site to start to see how similar or different are these things. And we discovered there were only about a dozen animals left in that population. And over the course of the year, about half of those we found had died, and the remainder were all older lizards. They were all at least 2 years old, based on their. Their body size and condition, which means that at the end of that year, they didn't really have any expectation of surviving to the next year. So we were really worried that we were in the midst of watching the extinction of this population. So we had lots of meetings with our permitting agencies like U.S. fish and Wildlife and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. And after lots of discussion and consideration of what we could do, we were given permission at the end of that season to bring five animals into captivity. Prisoner Chaffee Zoo to see if we could get them to reproduce.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Were these five of the six remaining individuals?
So you left one out there?
[00:36:14] Speaker C: Well, we actually had permission to get all of them, but we Couldn't find them. It turns out there were at least a few others there that we hadn't detected. Not, not many but we, we've seen there's still a few every year that attacks out there that are wild born and not from our captive population.
So there's a, a little bit still happening but not what you would call a healthy population. That's like one clutch maybe hatching.
[00:36:38] Speaker D: Yeah. And we should say that there's other ways of detecting the health of a population and simple numbers. So we had genotyped all these animals. The animals were brought into the zoo were on average between being half to full siblings. So the genetic diversity had. So it's dramatically restricted.
[00:36:55] Speaker C: So we, we got permission to bring them in and they'd never been. They must have been maintained in captivity some and maybe someone had bred them but there were no records of it. So we had nothing to go off of other than this is a desert lizard and expertise in rearing desert lizards. And we weren't really sure how well it was going to work but we were, we were quite successful that first year. We were able to get all of the females to produce clutches with the males. It was three females and two males. That was the spring of 2021 was when we first started being able to try to pair them up. Since then we've produced I believe over 250 hatchlings as of the last month or so and we've released 72 of them back to the wild. So we increased our breeding colony to 40 animals. 20 males and 20 females, 20 pairs. And they are maintained at Fresno Chaffee Zoo in our Conservation Action Centers. We have a dedicated building to the project that we have to do quite a lot to maintain the thermal conditions for them at least in captivity since they don't have as much space to roam around. So we've been quite successful in rearing them in captivity and maintaining actually the genetic diversity that we did have. We just today heard from our colleague who has been genotyping every animal that we've produced. We've taken a small tissue sample and we've had it genotyped and the data just came back on the last couple years hatchlings and, and we have not detectably lost any of the genetic diversity we started with. Which is kind of a hard thing to manage when you're in a captive situation. Typically you would have them just through sort of. Some individuals do better in captivity than others. You'll have some animals get really overrepresented. Other animals ancestry disappear and you'll lose some of that starting genetic diversity. But at least in the time we've been going, we've managed to maintain the original genetic diversity that we brought into captivity.
[00:38:52] Speaker B: But that was already fairly narrow, right?
[00:38:54] Speaker C: It was, it was fairly narrow.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: Are you concerned about genetic bottlenecks popping up?
[00:38:59] Speaker C: We are, we are concerned. It's hard to know what to do again until you get to hindsight, because this is a unique population that has been evolutionary, evolutionarily distinct from others even close to it for many thousands of years and it is diagnosable. So there's always a risk if we outcross them with other populations of potentially reducing the sort of adaptiveness of the animals on the landscape. Maybe they've got some special mix of genes that does really well right there and if we start bringing in outside alleles, we could mess that up somehow. So there's our, our permitters, I think rightly so, have been very cautious and wanted us to actually show.
Oh, they are, they are sort of suffering from lack of genetic diversity rather than just assuming that they're. That a problem is going on. In our few years of reproduction, even though we've produced so many, we've seen a pretty rapid drop off in reproductive output. So the number of eggs each female produces has gone down over time, which is. May be a signature of some inbreeding depression, even though we just learned today that we've managed to not have much increase in inbreeding depression or inbreeding. And inbreeding depression is the idea that when individuals are too closely related, you'll have this stack up of negative genes, negative alleles, and that can be harmful to the individuals.
So we have recently, just this past year, we got permission to collect some animals from a nearby population. It's only about 2 1/2 miles as the crow flies, but is 1,000ft separate and it's on private land. And we were granted permission to collect. We brought three animals in from that population and have started out crossing some of our colony reared animals with those.
And we're, we're looking at whether the, the egg output is any higher, whether the hatching success is any better and whether the babies seem more robust. Anecdotally, they do kind of seem more robust and like we've had higher hatching success, but we're still at the early stages and I haven't been able to actually crunch the numbers to test that hypothesis for sure.
[00:41:13] Speaker B: How long do the lizards live in captivity?
[00:41:16] Speaker C: We don't know exactly how long they can live because our first founders, many of them are still alive, those first five.
So we, we know in the wild they often don't make it past two. In captivity we're pretty sure they're going to live over 10 years. So they're some of their closest relatives that have been maintained in captivity a lot or in human care are the, like the eastern collared lizards. And they can commonly get to 12 to 15 in human care. In the wild they more commonly live five or six years.
[00:41:44] Speaker B: So you've released how many individuals back into this? It's a single colony, right, that you're, you're letting them go in. Right.
[00:41:51] Speaker C: We're currently releasing them all to the same population. This plateau in the hills that we were originally monitoring and saw decline.
We've released 72 back so far.
[00:42:05] Speaker B: Do you have data on survival rates?
[00:42:07] Speaker C: We do have some, yeah. So they, we've been doing it for three years now. The first year did not go very well. They survived the season just fine, but they weren't behaving like lizards. They. It was a really thick grass here. We let them go and they basically stayed at the spot we let them go and didn't do anything else. And lizards don't need to eat very much and they can sort of last a long time without dying. So they made it 10 weeks, but then we never saw any of them again after that. After we took their radio collars off of them that they were wearing at the time. The following year we altered our release protocols. We didn't, we made sure they didn't have the thick grass around them. We now sort of do real estate shopping. When we release them, we find an area where there's a sort of home burrow for them that's at least 6 inches deep so they can get into thermal refugia and then has bare ground contiguous with a shrub type thing they can use for shade. And that way they can thermoregulate by going in and out of the sun above ground while foraging and make it into shelter. So that's sort of our protocol now. We also found they heavily use a gravel and dirt. Gravel and dirt roadways in that landscape, which are the sort of bare ground that's there right now. And so we try to make, keep them to have contiguous bare ground with that roadway so that they're most likely to find the few wild animals that are still out there and find each other.
And we had a lot more success the second year. So we released 20 that year and we had. Well, they first got a decent number, got picked off by roadrunners in the first week after we released them, which I actually kind of see as a success because they're serving part of their food web service that they, they would have done as a, if there was a thriving population out there. So they're filling their niche.
[00:43:59] Speaker D: Honorary reptiles. They're little dinosaurs.
[00:44:01] Speaker C: Exactly.
They're such cool animals. And we had four of those make it overwinter emerge the next season, which is that overwinter making it through is a big sort of milestone for these things because they have to make it a long time without eating, which means they had eaten and foraged and persisted well enough during the year before that they could make it through through that whole dormant period. They also, because we were radio monitoring them, were using much more landscape and they were using the landscape similar to wild ones, which is a good sign that they're going to be able to persist in the landscape. And this year we actually saw one of those kids courting with a wild female. They were literally in the same hole together for a while. We don't know if she got a chance to lay any eggs because she unfortunately was predated shortly thereafter.
[00:44:50] Speaker D: Oops.
[00:44:51] Speaker C: And then this year we released 35. And it was a sort of weird year for them. For whatever reason, both the, the wild ones and the nearby populations we've looked at and ours were not active as late through the year as is typical. They had sort of started to go underground and act dormant in early mid June when usually they would go all the way through June and not do that till sort of early mid July.
And that means we, we weren't able to monitor many of them because we put this new tracking technology on them that has pros and cons. It is a solar hybrid battery hybrid and we're only able to detect them when they're underground for about three days. And if they're underground longer than three days, we can't find them anymore.
[00:45:32] Speaker B: I want to hear more about these, you know, these devices. You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host Ronnie Lipschitz. My guests today are doctors Rory Telemico and Michael Westfall who work on the conservation of snub nosed leopard lizards in the San Joaquin desert.
[00:45:49] Speaker D: Blunt nose?
[00:45:50] Speaker B: Blunt nose.
[00:45:52] Speaker C: In the literature they're also called snub nose. They have a bunch of mixed use names. So people have called them snub nose leopard lizards, Blunt nosed leopard lizards and then I like to call them valley dragons because I think if you have too many adjectives, that sounds much dramatic too.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Yeah, listen, in the Last few minutes. Tell us a little bit about these tracking devices. What do they do?
[00:46:13] Speaker C: Yeah, so we have two tracking technologies that we've employed. The older technology uses VHF radio transmitters, and they're fully battery powered. And a downside to them? Well, there's a couple, but one big one is they're fully limited by how big their battery is and how long they last. And you can't put a very large thing on a small animal. So we have to use little bitty batteries which last 10 to 12 weeks. And so we could release them with those on. And that's as much information as we would ever get from them. You also can't have too many because you start to have radio interference.
So if we wanted to release lots and lots and lots of animals, we wouldn't be able to use put tags on every single one of them. We've now begun using and testing a new technology that uses or newer technology, UHF digital radios. And they require a little bit less power.
And because the signal is digitally encoded, you basically have no limits on the number of animals that you can have out simultaneously. And it also allows us to use some remote sensing technology.
We have put out what we think is the largest to date automated radio telemetry system. And it involves a central tower that listens to a bunch of these. They're called nodes. They kind of look like a cell phone that we put on a pole. And so the pole then can listen for the tags or that cell phone node thing. And then it sends its signals to the tower. And we've put about 300 of them so far out on this plateau. And we can use them to trilateralize or estimate the location really precisely to within a few meters of the animals every two minutes. So instead of us having to handheld go out and find where they are, maybe get a signal for them once a day, and have this giant mammal coming close to them that's going to be influencing their behavior and their foraging. We can remotely be getting their locations every two minutes without being having a human pestering them. It takes a lot of computation. And so it's not like an instantaneous. We just look at a thing and it's there. But once we get all the data in and we run it through its processing, we get these very finite tracks of how the lizard has been using its landscape, where it's been going, exactly how it responded to release all this really fascinating information.
One of the pros and the cons of this technology is it uses a solar hybrid battery connection, which means that it'll the transmitters can last for years, potentially two, three years, although we haven't fully tested that yet because we haven't been using them terribly long, which is the whole natural lifespan of the lizard. So we should be able to get lifetime location information.
But they only send out their pings when they're charged up, so they have to be exposed to the sun. And the batteries last about three days when they're not in the sun. So when the lizards go down and are dormant, they stop pinging, but then we can locate them again as soon as they come back up. So the fact that we had a bunch of animals go dormant in June means that we're not exactly sure if they, if they suddenly died or if they went dormant and are just hanging out till the weather gets a little better and are going to come back up. We did, for almost half of them this year, put our older radios on them first. And we know that about 75% of those survive through 10 weeks, as long as those tags last. So it seems we're having both good behavior right now and fairly high survivorship. Though, as I, as I briefly mentioned before, the grasshopper density is abnormally low this year for reasons I am uncertain of. And so a lot of our lizards, when we were recapturing them, didn't have very much food in their guts. And what they did have felt more like small beetles than grasshoppers. You actually can kind of feel the shape of the thing inside of them when they've swallowed it. So they seem to be doing pretty well this year, but we're not 100%.
[00:50:09] Speaker B: Sure yet what's the future of the project.
[00:50:11] Speaker C: We want to keep tweaking how we release the animals and to test what is the best management strategy. And we sort of have started with what's called hard release. We just let them go with nothing and then we're sort of adding management on as we go. So we've, we've shifted to doing that real estate shopping I mentioned. And we're, we're working up to try possibly doing what's called a soft release, where you sort of fence in an area and protect it and possibly even supplement food for the when they're first released, they can kind of get used to their surroundings. And then you sort of open up the fencing and let them naturally disperse out. We've also begun testing habitat mitigation strategies like sheep grazing on the landscape. So we have experimental graze plots and ungrazed areas. And we're releasing the lizards sort of between them and then Letting them choose where to go to see if they prefer grazed or ungrazed. And we can tweak our strategy of grazing. We've also, within the last year, discovered the recolonization of this area by another endangered San Joaquin endemic species called the giant kangaroo rat, which has a much scarier name than what it actually is. They are bigger than other kangaroo rats, but they're about the size of a gerbil. They aren't kangaroos, but they do bounce and they aren't rats, but they are rodents. So their whole name is a misnomer.
But they're these cool sort of ecosystem engineers that often coexist with leopard lizards. And so one of the things we're. We're hoping to do if we're able to get the funding, is use our automated telemetry system with the giant kangaroo rats as well. And once we have some of them tagged, we can in real time, basically see how are the kangaroo rats and the leopard lizards interacting with one another and using our grazed and ungrazed plots, which sort of gets at my dream for this project, which is to be able to use this, this massive automated radio telemetry system and our, our access out there and skills out there to test ways of reintroducing native San Joaquin desert species to really figure out what works. Use it as sort of that experimental testing ground. And then once we know what works, we can communicate to our colleagues with places like the Nature Conservancy that are restoring areas into San Joaquin desert habitat. And we could tell them, well, this is how we could then get these vertebrates back out on that landscape in a successful way.
[00:52:35] Speaker D: And it's important to note that giant kangaroo rats are good engineers for leopard lizards for at least two reasons. One is they are grazers, and they graze the areas around their burrows bare, so they make the bare ground that the lizards need. And their burrow systems seem to be excellent refuges for leopard lizards, like the. The best they can, you know, high value real estate for leopard lizards.
[00:52:59] Speaker B: Well, I'm afraid we're out of time, but three cheers for the. The leopard lizard and success for your project. I want to thank you. Thank you, Rory. And thank you, Michael, for being my guests on Sustainability now.
[00:53:12] Speaker C: Thank you so much. We were. I was thrilled to be here and tell people about these just awesome animals and ecosystems that are right in their backyard.
[00:53:20] Speaker B: You've been listening to a sustainability NOW interview with Dr. Rory Telemaco, research director at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, and Dr. Michael Westphal from the Bureau of Land Management.
Both are involved in a project to restore viable populations of the blunt nosed leopard lizard in the southern portion of the San Joaquin Valley. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] Sustainability now, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites.
So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: Zones and tropic climbs n through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees Strong o zone and safe sunshine Good planets are hard to find yeah, good.
