Rings and syringes for gastric lavage.
With only two weeks left in El Yunque, Puerto Rico, the two projects that Travis Ingram and I are doing will soon come to a close. Travis has already written about one project, the enclosure experiment. The second is a diet survey of six species (Anolis evermanni, A. stratulus, A. cristatellus, A. gundlachi, A. pulchellus, and A. krugi) that are sympatric in the area around where we are staying. The goal is to quantify diet overlap between these species. To obtain the stomach contents, we use a nonlethal method known as gastric lavage. I chose this method unsure of how it would turn out because, before this trip, Travis and I had had very little practice performing gastric lavage. My hope was that we could take this technique that we had read about and practiced a few times in the lab and become good enough at it to do it potentially hundreds of times in the field.
