Staniel Cay is one of the quaint Caribbean backwaters, populated by yachtsmen, expats, scalawags, locals and…scientists. For more than 30 years, Tom Schoener, David Spiller and associates have worked here, producing a series of textbook studies on food web ecology (most recently here).
Having finished our work in Marsh Harbour, we have relocated to Staniel, marking a return for me after a 19 year absence. As our plane wended its way down the Exuma
- Headin’ south down the Exumas.
chain, the memories of my previous visits and their results came flooding back. While a graduate student in the 80’s, I read Schoener and Schoener’s 1983 Nature paper reporting the results of introductions of brown anoles (A. sagrei) to very small islands (approx. the size of a baseball diamond) around Staniel Cay. S&S, noting that islands of this size do not normally harbor anoles, decided to introduce lizards to watch the populations wither away, and thus learn something about the process of extinction. But to their surprise, the populations did not go quietly into the night. Instead, they thrived and some downright exploded in numbers, one island going from 10 introduced lizards to 98 the next year.