View of the Andean scrubland, the main habitat of the lizards of the Anolis heterodermus group. Credits: Rafael Moreno.
Several years ago, when I began my biology studies, I was taking a walk in an Andean scrubland near my hometown, Bogotá, and while admiring the twisted shapes of the shrub branches, I noticed a small bright-green elongated spot on a branch, which stood out from the surrounding vegetation. The spot looked like an altered vision produced by entheogenic substances. As I approached the spot, my anxiety increased because it was slowly rotating around the small branch while I was getting closer. But when I was close enough to identify it, my anxiety ceased. It was not a hallucination, but a lizard, an Anolis heterodermus!
Some years later, my anxiety returned when I thought about the future of those lizards due to the advance of a gigantic city hungry for concrete. We decided to investigate it by trying to document the dynamics of populations in scrublands surrounding Bogotá. Even though the city continued its inexorable growth, it seemed that these lizards had several strategies to face the loss and fragmentation of their habitat, but only if the urban development onslaught was not too strong. Thus, my anxiety ceased, but only partially.
A small sample of the huge phenotypic diversity in A. heterodermus y A. richteri. Credits: Rafael Moreno.