Category: Research Methods Page 7 of 9

Adult Gryllodes (image from http://www.just-green.com/)

In a previous post on the evolution of the Glor Lab’s lizard room, Julienne discussed our general strategy for acquiring anole food.  As Julienne discussed, the crickets for our adult lizards are obtained primarily in the form of bi-weekly shipments from Fluker Farms.  However, we also have a fairly large cricket breeding operation that provides many of the small crickets required by our hatchling lizards.  One reason for maintaining this colony is that Flukers does not reliably supply pin-heads that are small enough for some of our newest additions.  Another reason for maintaining this colony is the hope that this colony will eventually grow to the point that it also supplies feeder crickets to the remainder of our colony.  One somewhat unusual thing about our colony is stocked with Gryllodes rather than Acheta (the type of cricket that you get from Flukers and other large cricket farms).

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Using a Shopvac can really speed-up cleaning dirty cricket cages (left) and also help knock-down spider populations (right).

As we’ve discussed previously in our series on the evolution of a lizard room, some little tools and tricks can save you lots of time when maintaining a reasonably large lizard breeding facility.  One useful new tool that we added to our lizard maintenance repertoire a few months ago was a Shopvac.  We purchased a 3-gallon Shopvac model for around $60 with the initial goal of using it primarily for clearing substrate from the bottom of dirty lizard and cricket cages.  The Shopvac works like a charm for this purpose.  We no longer have to endure awkward and time-consuming cleaning sessions that involve tipping unwieldy cages into a garbage bin.  Another unforeseen use of the Shopvac is to knock-down the massive population of spiders that persists on a diet of our feeder crickets.  Sucking up spiders, spider webs and spider eggs is much easier than trying to knock them down with your hands or a broom (at the end of the process you also get the satisfaction of looking into the Shopvac’s dustbin and seeing all the hundreds of spiders and spider egg cases that you’ve taken down).  In my view, the money we spent on the Shopvac was money well spent.

A grass bush anole, Anolis olssoni, from the Dominican Republic. Note the three colored beads sewed into the tail musculature for easy identification in the field. Photo by Michele Johnson.

Many studies of natural selection, behavioral ecology, and population biology in anoles focus on one to several populations over the course of days, weeks, or months. These studies require reliable identification of individual lizards over time. I describe several ID’ing methods in this post. Read on!

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Left: Tubs used to house crickets. Right: The set up inside a cricket tub.

To continue our series on lab anole husbandry, let’s talk food! We feed our room full of hungry anoles Acheta crickets ordered from Fluker Farms. We house crickets in 21-gallon plastic tubs (bought from places like Target or Home Depot) that have been modified for ventilation – we cut holes in the lids and glue wire screen on top. We provide egg layer mash for food, water crystals (usually used for plants) on a small deli cup lid for water, and egg crates to give them places to hide.

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As Julienne mentioned in the introductory post in our series on lab anole husbandry, we’ve been through a lot of trial and error over the past few years.  One fairly persistent issue has been maintaining our lizard rooms temperature and humidity.  Without humidification, our room’s humidity fluctuated from lows of around 5% in the winter months to highs around 30 or 40% during the summer months.  We’ve used a number of different techniques to introduce more humidity into the room, with varying degrees of success.  A brief recap of our experiences is below.

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